User's Role in Shaping WeChat as an Infrastructure

User’s Role in Shaping WeChat as an Infrastructure: Practice, Appropriation, Creation

A DissertationPresented to

The Academic Faculty

By

Rui Zhou

In Partial Fulfillmentof the Requirements for the Degree

Doctor of Philosophy in theSchool of Interactive Computing

College of Computing

Georgia Institute of Technology

December 2020

Copyright © Rui Zhou 2020

User’s Role in Shaping WeChat as an Infrastructure:Practice, Appropriation, Creation

Approved by:

Dr. Betsy DiSalvoSchool of Interactive ComputingGeorgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Rebecca E. GrinterSchool of Interactive ComputingGeorgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Carl DiSalvoSchool of Interactive ComputingGeorgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Ken AndersonNext Generation and StandardsIntel Corporation

Dr. Xinning GuiCollege of Information Sciences and TechnologyPennsylvania State University

Date approved: August 12th, 2020

WeChat is a necessity. It can’t be deleted.

Anonymous study participant

For my parents, Jianhua Zhou and Dan He, who have provided unconditional love to me

throughout my life.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To become a researcher is one of the most challenging, if not the most, tasks I have

assigned myself. I could not have completed this journey without the generous help offered

by many people along the road.

Dr. Betsy DiSalvo is my advisor, who has invested a lot of time, energy, and effort on

me. Being in an academic world was hard, and there were definitely times when I thought

I could not finish this degree. But Betsy was always there, offering hope and giving me

strength. She is the best kind of advisor and mentor one could have imagined. Dr. Beki

Grinter was the first professor I met with at Georgia Tech, who had later provided invaluable

support and advise throughout my Ph.D. years. Chatting with Beki has also been delightful

because of her great sense of humor. Dr. Carl DiSalvo is the first one I knew among all

my committee members — through reading and learning his work when I was still a master

student. His suggestion on going deep with theory inspired me to explore literature on

infrastructure and later perceiveWeChat as an infrastructure. Dr. Ken Anderson is the most

atypical “white old man” I have met, and I attributed this to his anthropology background.

Thanks to Ken, I am able to see the power of anthropology not only in academia but also in

industry. My work on WeChat has been directly influenced by Dr. Xinning Gui’s work on

WeChat. Being both Chinese young females working in the United States, Xinning and I

share many commonalities (one of them is the love of cat). It is a pleasure to have Xinning

on my committee.

I would have never thought myself as a researcher before 2013. It was not an exagger

ation to say that Dr. Shaowen Bardzell and Dr. Jeff Bardzell had changed my life when

they recruited me as a research assistant while I was working on my master degree at In

diana University. During my time at Indiana University, life had been more challenging

than work due to a severe culture shock. Professor Marty Siegel made this difficult time

easier for me and I owe him. Professor Erik Stolterman is kind and wise. He taught me the

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important lesson that one’s success may not always result from one’s hard work but more

from other people’s support. Dr. Eli Blevis is funny but insightful and candid. I enjoyed our

time together both in Bloomington and in Hong Kong. Thanks to these wonderful teachers

at Indiana University, I had the confidence to move forward and work on a higherlevel

degree at Georgia Tech.

Duringmy time at Georgia Tech, I was lucky to workwithmany talented individuals and

learn from them. It was a great experience to work as Dr. Barbara Ericson’s and Dr. Amy

Bruckman’s teaching assistant. Being in their classes and learning how they teach is a pure

pleasure. Dr. Rosa Arriaga and Dr. Mark Guzdial’s kindness and care had brought a lot of

warmth to me, both in and out of their classes. I was fortunate to have met many professors

outside of School of Interactive Computing, and I appreciate the breadth of knowledge they

brought to me. These professors include Dr. Robert Rosenberger, Dr. Jennifer Singh, Dr.

Ian Bogost, Jason Borenstein, and Dr. Lisa Yaszek. Special thanks to Dr. Anne Pollock,

who is now at King’s College London. I was extremely fortunate to be in Anne’s last two

classes taught at Georgia Tech. Her wisdom and charm is beyond most scholars’.

Besides great teachers, I also owe a lot to my fantastic peers. They are Amber Solomon,

MarisolWongVillacres, VanessaOguamanam, KaylaDesPortes, MichaelanneDye,Mehrab

Bin Morshed, Dingtian (Alan) Zhang, Qiaosi (Chelsea) Wang, and Ari Schlesinger. I am

also greatful to have worked with Sue Faulkner from Intel. The time Sue and I conducted

fieldwork in Beijing together was one of the best among all my field trips. As a qualitative

researcher, one should never forget that one’s achievement will not be possible if people

are not willing to share their stories. I sincerely appreciate all the participants I have met

during my research — thank you all for trusting me and sharing your life experiences with

me.

Finally, there are friends and family, who are always there for me and have faith in

me. Although we do not have many chances to hang out in person, as lifelong friends,

Si Lei and Yong (Daisy) Tang have sent me love and care from across the Pacific Ocean.

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My grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins have all supported me in whatever ways they

could, and I do not know how to repay them. I was a stubborn kid when I was young, and I

am still quite stubborn after all these years. My parents, Jianhua Zhou and Dan He, accept

me as who I am and take care of me with their endless patience— qualities I admire but can

never gain. The last one to thank is the one who I did not find but who found me. Yuxiang

Jiang, thank you for debugging LaTeX for me when Visual Studio Code’s error report drives

me crazy, thank you for reminding me Vim operators when I forget them, and above all,

thank you for teaching me to play computer games and feeding me in all those days I was

too lazy to cook. Having you as a life partner is the best thing that ever happens to me.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v

List of Tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiv

List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv

List of Symbols and Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xviii

Chapter 1: Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1.1 Dissertation Statements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

1.2 Research Questions and Scope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

1.3 Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

1.4 Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

1.5 Overview of Dissertation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Chapter 2: Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

2.1 Changes in Contemporary China: From 1978 to Now . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

2.2 Internet in China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

2.3 Introduction of WeChat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

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Chapter 3: Literature Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

3.1 Social Construction of Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

3.2 Platform . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22

3.3 Infrastructure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

3.4 Platform Infrastructuralization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

3.4.1 Platform vs. Infrastructure: Commonalities and Differences . . . . 26

3.4.2 The Infrastructuralizaton of Platforms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

3.5 WeChat in HCI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

Chapter 4: LongDistance Communication between Parents and Children . . . 31

4.1 Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

4.2 Data Collection and Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

4.2.1 Part One Chinese Students in the United States . . . . . . . . . . 32

4.2.2 Part Two Chinese Parents in China . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

4.2.3 Part Three Data Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

4.3 Findings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

4.3.1 Media of Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

4.3.2 Each Medium Has a Role . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

4.3.3 Presentation of the Child: An Independent Adult . . . . . . . . . . 41

4.3.4 Presentation of Parents: Caring but Not Annoying . . . . . . . . . 44

4.3.5 Breakdowns of SelfPresentations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

4.4 Discussion and Contribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

4.4.1 “The Medium Is the Message” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

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4.4.2 Chinese Culture and the Presentation of Self . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

4.4.3 Understanding User’s Interaction with WeChat . . . . . . . . . . . 51

Chapter 5: Communication via Emoji and Stickers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53


5.2 Findings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

5.2.1 Emoji/Stickers for NonVerbal Cues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

5.2.2 Emoji/Stickers for Complementing Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

5.2.3 Emoji/Stickers Collaborates with Red Packets . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

5.2.4 Stickers Represent One’s Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

5.2.5 Emoji/Stickers Cultivate Subcultures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

5.2.6 Democratize Stickers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64


5.3.1 Emoji/Stickers Can Support Text Communication . . . . . . . . . . 66

5.3.2 Emoji/Stickers Can Complement Text When Text Is Incomplete . . 67

5.3.3 Creative Use of Emoji/Stickers Without Text . . . . . . . . . . . . 67


Chapter 6: Young People’s Social Commerce Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

6.1 Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69


6.3 Findings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

6.3.1 A Typical Transaction Process on WeChat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

6.3.2 Buyers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

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6.3.3 Sellers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74

6.3.4 Rationales for Buying and Selling on WeChat . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

6.3.5 Social Commerce on WeChat Is Risky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84


6.4.1 Chinese Social Context Shapes Young People and WeChat . . . . . 87

6.4.2 WeChat Attracts Young People with Social and Payment Functions 88

6.4.3 Young People Leverage Technology to Address Diverse Motivations 90


Chapter 7: The Twin Role of WeChat in Social Commerce . . . . . . . . . . . . 93

7.1 Background: Social Commerce and Guanxi in China . . . . . . . . . . . . 93


7.3 Findings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96

7.3.1 Buyers and Sellers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96

7.3.2 An Overview of Social Commerce on WeChat . . . . . . . . . . . 99

7.3.3 Buyers and Sellers Establish Connections through Existing Guanxion WeChat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100

7.3.4 Sellers Cultivate and StrengthenGuanxi with Buyers throughDemonstrating Product Quality with Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102

7.3.5 Using WeChat for Social Commerce Can Hurt Guanxi . . . . . . . 105



7.5 Impact on WeChat’s Social Commerce due to New Taxation Law . . . . . . 110

7.5.1 Background: A Grey Market on WeChat and a New Taxation Law . 111

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7.5.2 An Unexpected Finding: The Grey Market on WeChat Was NotImpacted . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

Chapter 8: WeChat Represents China in the United States . . . . . . . . . . . . 116

8.1 Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116


8.3 Findings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123

8.3.1 Situations and Reasons of Turning Away from WeChat . . . . . . . 123

8.3.2 Situations and Reasons of Staying on WeChat . . . . . . . . . . . . 130


8.4.1 The Technical Aspect of WeChat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

8.4.2 The Format Aspect of WeChat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136

8.4.3 The Cultural Aspect of WeChat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136


Chapter 9: User’s Role in Platform Infrastructuralization . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139

9.1 Data Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139

9.2 A ThreeLevel User Interaction Process of Platform Infrastructuralization . 141

9.2.1 Level 1: To Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141

9.2.2 Level 2: To Appropriate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

9.2.3 Level 3: To Create . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147

9.3 Infrastructure Is a Contextualized Relation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150

9.4 WeChat as a PlatformInfrastructure and Implications of Platform Infrastructuralization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152

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Chapter 10: Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157

Appendices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161

Appendix A: Chapter 8 Diary Study Instrument . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162

References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164

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LIST OF TABLES

4.1 Study 1 Student Participant Demographics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

4.2 Study 1 Parent Participant Demographics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

4.3 Study 1 Communication Media Used by Participants. . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

5.1 Study 2 Participant Demographics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55




9.1 Four Studies on User’s Practice of WeChat in China. . . . . . . . . . . . . 140

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LIST OF FIGURES

2.1 An Example of Fashion Trends in China in the 1980s. . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

2.2 WeChat Landing Page. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

2.3 Send an Audio Message in WeChat. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

4.1 The Medium Probe Kit. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

5.1 A Subset of All the Emoji on WeChat. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

5.2 An Example of Sticker. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

5.3 Traditional Paper Red Packets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

5.4 Digital Red Packets in a WeChat Group Conversation. . . . . . . . . . . . 59

5.5 Various Stickers Featuring Red Packets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

7.1 Access QR Code Scanner. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

7.2 Pay Seller with Red Packets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

7.3 P14’s (daigou) Moments Posts Showed She Was Buying at an Airport inJapan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

8.1 On a Table in a Tea Shop in Cupertino, an Advertisement Says “OpenWeChat or Alipay to Scan, Order, and Pay for the Food.” . . . . . . . . . . 120

9.1 McDonald’s WeChat Mini Program. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148

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9.2 An Advertisement for a Pirated WeChat with a List of Extra Functions thatAre Not Provided by the Official WeChat. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149

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LIST OF SYMBOLS AND ABBREVIATIONS

ANT ActorNetwork Theory

C2C consumertoconsumer

CMC ComputerMediated Communication

GFW The Great Firewall

HCI HumanComputer Interaction

ICT information and communication technology

IRB Institutional Review Board

MIM mobile instant messenger

PRC People’s Republic of China

QR code Quick Response code

SCOT Social construction of technology

SEZ Special Economic Zone

SMS short message service

SNS social networking site

STS Science and Technology Studies

UK United Kingdom

US United States

WTO World Trade Organization

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SUMMARY

The past decade has seen the rapid development of information and communication

technologies (ICTs), particularly online social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

While online social platforms have existed since the early years of the internet, it is only

in recent years that they begin to set foot on mobile devices, bringing them accessible to

more people from all over the globe. Gradually gaining their presence in people’s everyday

lives, some of these social platforms (e.g., Facebook) have started expanding themselves

from a simple social platform to a more powerful, more embedded, and more transparent

infrastructure, supporting their users through various ways that are not limited to social or

communication aspects.

One instance of such a social platform that has successfully turned into an infrastruc

ture is WeChat, the most popular mobile social application in China. Introduced in 2011,

WeChat is currently the fifth largest social networking platform in the world, holding 1.16

billion monthly active users, who are mostly Chinese people living in China. When it was

first developed, WeChat was solely a mobile instant messenger that supported users with

a set of common communication media, including text messaging, audio messaging, etc.

However, throughout its growth in the past nine years, it has also designed and integrated

many noncommunication, nonsocial functions for online payment, gaming, and much

more. Nowadays, Chinese people use WeChat all the time: from paying street vendors to

calling ridehailing services, from reading daily news to reserving restaurant tables, WeChat

is not only a communication tool but also an allencompassing platform and infrastructure

that Chinese people use to fulfill all kinds of needs. Given this prominent presence of

WeChat and its status as both a platform and an infrastructure, WeChat’s development and

its relationship with its users are worth studying; its success offers a lot to learn about other

similar platforms that are swiftly evolving into infrastructures.

This dissertation delves deep into understandingWeChat by focusing on how people use

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it — taking a usercentered perspective. It asks questions about how people use WeChat,

why people use WeChat, and how people’s use of WeChat has influenced WeChat to move

from a platform to an infrastructure. To answer these questions, five empirical studies were

conducted, revolving around Chinese people’s use of different functions on WeChat under

various situations and scenarios. Relying on qualitative methods, these studies together pro

vide a holistic view of how people use WeChat. In addition, a metaanalysis was done on

data collected from these studies, aiming for teasing out the user’s role in WeChat’s evolve

ment from a platform to an infrastructure. Findings from these studies reveal that while

WeChat influences users and shapes their interactions with each other, it is also affected

and changed by users’ practices as well. Furthermore, by using WeChat, users, knowingly

or not, have pushed WeChat to become a powerful infrastructure. This dissertation is the

first indepth study that researches diverse aspects of WeChat by attending to people’s ways

of using it, providing a holistic view of Chinese people’s engagements with WeChat in their

everyday lives and how these engagements contribute to WeChat’s becoming an infrastruc

ture.

This dissertation offers three major contributions to the field of HumanComputer In

teraction (HCI): first, it provides an indepth exploration of a popular nonWestern social

and communication application (i.e., WeChat); second, by taking a usercentered perspec

tive, this dissertation uncovers the mutualshaping relationship between WeChat and its

users; third, most importantly, this dissertation contributes to understanding other social

platforms’ infrastructuralization processes by using WeChat as an exemplar, uncovering

the role played by users in this process.

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

I was introduced to WeChat in early 2012 by my cousin. Not being a passionate follower

of new technology, I decided to try out WeChat anyway since my cousin described it as

“different from all the other instant messengers because you can send short audio messages

just like text messages.” “It’s really convenient because you don’t have to type, and the

person on the other end can listen to your messages whenever they are free,” he added.

“Sure,” I said, staring at the green logo of WeChat on my phone, wondering if I would

ever encounter an occasion that would push me to use this audio messaging feature. At

that time, with few people using it or ever heard of it, I thought WeChat was just another

instant messenger that people might use for a while out of curiosity and then delete and

forget about. To be honest, I had no expectation for WeChat.

But to my surprise, as some of my friends began to use WeChat around the same time,

I found it was actually quite fun to chat with them on WeChat since we could explore

its entertaining functions together. For example, there were stickers: smallsized images

representing people’s expressions and emotions. With various styles of stickers provided

on WeChat, my friends and I enjoyed sending stickers when we chatted, creating more fun

than solely using text. There was also a feature called “Shake,” with which people could

add each other’s WeChat account if they were viciously shaking their phones at the same

time. Playful features like these were not seen on other mobile instant messengers but only

on WeChat, attracting me to spend more time on WeChat. Later, WeChat kept integrating

many creative features as it developed. One of the most enjoyable features was Red Packet,

whichWeChat digitized the centuryold Chinese tradition of sending red paper packets with

cash inside to express good wishes. I had a lot of fun exchanging Red Packets with friends

and family on WeChat after the feature was released. Truly, WeChat presented all kinds of

1

surprise by constantly introducing new features that were not seen elsewhere. To me, it felt

like WeChat was always young, always fresh, never boring, and never old.

Later, I realized I was not the only one who felt this way — around me, everybody who

used WeChat held similar feelings, that WeChat was fun, WeChat offered a lot to explore,

and WeChat sucked most of our time when we were on our phones. It seemed like we were

stuck on WeChat, unable to withdraw from it. Even my 80yearold grandmother spent

a large portion of her time on WeChat, watching and smiling at the videos of her great

grandchildren, who were not by her side. I was fascinated by WeChat’s ability to attract

different people and wondered what made WeChat this way, and what made it intriguing

to diverse populations with distinct backgrounds from all over China. While there were

other popular instant messengers such as QQ, none had reached the popularity WeChat had

gained. Likewise, although other countries also have social applications such as Facebook

and Twitter, these applications remained largely social networks that one could not do much

other than connecting with people and socializing. (For example, one could not send Red

Packets on Facebook.) Being a mobile application, WeChat was distinct from other instant

messengers and social networks in that it constantly attracted people to it, kept them on it,

and at the same time integrating both new social and nonsocial functions to attract even

more people, time, and attention. As diverse and as powerful, WeChat was a peculiar phe

nomenon that had not seen at anywhere else in the world. Interested in why WeChat grows

so influential that people cannot leave it, I want to closely study WeChat by attending to

how WeChat is used by people and how this use of means for both WeChat and its users.

1.1 Dissertation Statements

While WeChat started as a mobile instant messenger in 2011, during the past nine years, it

gradually evolves to become a necessity that is embedded in all aspects of Chinese people’s

life. Holding 1.16 billion monthly active users (Statista, 2020), it is one of the most popular

and most established social platforms in the world. Simply due to this gigantic scale and

2

powerful presence, WeChat deserves a careful, thorough examination.

The popularity of WeChat builds on every individual user’s practice of WeChat. There

fore, why people choose to use WeChat and how exactly they use it are key aspects to ex

plore in order to understand WeChat’s success and its embeddedness in people’s lives. Al

though there are many factors that influence WeChat’s development (Y. Chen et al., 2018),

I argue people’s use of WeChat is one of the central factors that shape and change WeChat.

By adjusting its design and development based on user’s needs and practices, WeChat at

tracts more and more people to use it and makes it difficult for people to leave it.

It is difficult for people to leave and stop using WeChat because WeChat is a necessity

for getting around in urban China — it is no longer a simple mobile instant messenger but

an allencompassing platform which some argue has become as an infrastructure (Plantin &

de Seta, 2019). Witnessing WeChat integrating social functions and all kinds of other non

social functions such as money payment features, which render WeChat almost omnipotent

for fulfilling people’s needs, I agree that WeChat has indeed become an infrastructure in

China. Further, I argue that WeChat’s move from a platform to an infrastructure is in close

relation to the ways Chinese people using it, meaning that people’s use of WeChat directly

influence WeChat to evolve into an infrastructure. WeChat affects people through the func

tions and features it provides, while people also makes WeChat mightier through their use

of WeChat. Essentially, this is how WeChat and its users relate to and influence each other.

This dissertation presents my fiveyear project that examines how WeChat moves from

a platform to an infrastructure, through focusing on how Chinese people use WeChat to

achieve their goals and the role played by WeChat in people’s lives. I find that Chinese

people useWeChat for all kinds of purposes and in a wide variety of occasions; andWeChat

is the default communication and social tool for most of the Chinese. There is no doubt that

WeChat plays a prominent role in supporting Chinese people’s lives, as both a platform and

an infrastructure.

3

1.2 Research Questions and Scope

In this dissertation, I will explain how I arrive at the conclusion that “WeChat plays a promi

nent role in Chinese people’s lives as both a platform and an infrastructure.” through an

swering the following research questions:

• How do Chinese people use WeChat in their everyday lives?

• Why do Chinese people use WeChat the ways they use it? What are their motivations

and reasons behind?

• How does people’s use of WeChat influence WeChat, as a platform moving towards

an infrastructure?

To approach these research questions, I broke them further down into five smaller stud

ies and looked at different aspects of WeChat in these studies. For the first four studies,

I focused on studying Chinese people’s use of WeChat within China; for the last study, I

turned to Chinese people who are living overseas, looking at Chinese immigrants’ and na

tionals’ use of WeChat in the United States (US). While these fives studies have their own

specific research questions and touch upon different parts of WeChat (e.g., communication

media, social network, and commercial features), they together provide a holistic view of

WeChat and how it is used. However, since WeChat is constantly developing, these studies

do not cover all aspects of WeChat and nor do they aim to, which is part of the limitation

of my project. They aim for answering the research questions above, and the answers will

be offered in later chapters of this dissertation.

1.3 Methodology

In this dissertation, all five studies were conducted with qualitative methodology. This is

appropriate as the major research questions are how Chinese people use WeChat and why

they use WeChat the ways they use it. Qualitative methods are suitable for digging deep

4

into understanding the details of and motivations behind a phenomenon. The phenomenon

that is in concern here is people’s interactions with WeChat.

Two qualitative methods I mainly used are interview and observation. Both being

ethnographicallyinformed, I used them to trace and record the ways different people using

WeChat. With interview, I was also able to explore what WeChat means for people in their

lives, obtaining a holistic view of WeChat’s relationship with its users. Other qualitative

methods I used include medium probe (DiSalvo et al., 2016), diary studies, etc. In my

studies, these methods act as prompts for participants to open up, which I then relied on

followup interviews to discuss details with participants. Data collected from methods like

medium probe and diary studies can also triangulate with data collected from interview and

observation, guaranteeing the reliability of findings.

Since the methods used in each study varies slightly, they will be detailed in the chapters

corresponds to the study (from Chapter 4 to Chapter 8). In addition, all these studies were

approved by Georgia Tech’s Institutional Review Board before conducting.

1.4 Contributions

Focusing on how Chinese people interact with WeChat in their daily lives, this dissertation

contributes to the field of HCI from three aspects:

1. This dissertation is an indepth investigation of a popular nonWestern communica

tion and social application (i.e., WeChat). Since WeChat is developed in China and

mostly used by Chinese people, WeChat carries many characteristics of China and the

Chinese culture. While HCI has paid much attention to social platforms developed

under Western contexts such as Facebook (Evans et al., 2018; Jack et al., 2017), and

while WeChat has been studied by HCI researchers as well (Gui et al., 2017; Qiu et

al., 2016), there lacks a holistic overview of WeChat as an influential social platform

in a nonWestern cultural context. This dissertation fills this gap.

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2. Methodologically speaking, by studying WeChat from a usercentered perspective,

this dissertation uncovers how the user and WeChat shape and change each other

through their interactions. Thus, this dissertation rejects the idea that WeChat, as a

technology, could develop solely on its own (which is the tenet of technology deter

minism (Kline, 2001)).

3. Finally, this dissertation contributes to understanding the ongoing, global phenomenon

of platform infrastructuralization by taking WeChat as an exemplar. By analyzing

data collected from the five empirical studies I conducted, I identify the role played

by the user in WeChat’s platform infrastructuralization process: users, by interacting

with a platform, can potentially contribute to the platform becoming an infrastructure.

1.5 Overview of Dissertation

This dissertation has 10 chapters. Followed by this first chapter of introduction, the sec

ond chapter offers background information that is necessary for contextualizing and un

derstanding my dissertation. This background information includes major societal changes

happened in China from the year of 1978 to now, a brief history of the internet in China,

and also an introduction of WeChat. After that, in Chapter 3, I reviewed relevant literature

regarding my focus on WeChat’s platform infrastructuralization from five aspects: social

construction of technology, understandings of platform, understandings of infrastructure,

platform infrastructuralization, and WeChat in HCI.

FromChapter 4 to Chapter 8, I detailed five empirical studies I conducted for my overall

project of understanding how people use WeChat. Although each of the studies focuses on

different aspects of WeChat use, they all contribute to the understanding of people use of

WeChat as both a platform and an infrastructure. In Chapter 4, I discuss my first study on

WeChat about howChinese parents and their adolescent children, whowere studying abroad

in colleges, used variousmedia onWeChat to communicate and craft their selfimages. Uses

of WeChat I found in this study conform to WeChat’s design intention. Chapter 5 is also

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about user communication, but focuses on communication via emoji and stickers, which are

pictorial representations of expression and emotion. Relying on functions on WeChat that

support emoji and stickers, users not only sent them as they were intended to be sent but also

appropriated stickers for their own purposes. The next chapter, Chapter 6, switches focus

to look at how young Chinese people take advantage of WeChat’s instant messenger and

social network (with the help of money transaction functions) to buy and sell on WeChat:

hence young people’s social commerce on WeChat. Chapter 7 continues to look at social

commerce on WeChat, but presents a more comprehensive study on social commerce on

WeChat by focusing on adults’ experiences, thus delving deeper into the relationship be

tween WeChat and social commerce, and the role played by WeChat in social commerce.

My last empirical study on WeChat, as presented in Chapter 8, is about WeChat’s use in the

US, an environment outside China. As a medium, WeChat carries multiple messages, and

users in the US weigh these messages to decide when to leave and when to stay onWeChat.

Using data collected from these studies, I conducted a new analysis, focusing on how

user’s interaction of WeChat could influence WeChat to move from a platform to an infras

tructure in China. I found that the user interacts with WeChat on three levels: to practice, to

appropriate, and to create. The second and the third levels directly contribute to WeChat’s

infrastructuralization. Chapter 9 details this analysis and its finding: the threelevel user

interaction process of platform infrastructuralization, which is the theoretical contribution

of my dissertation. In the last chapter, I conclude this dissertation and discuss future work

opportunities.

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CHAPTER 2

BACKGROUND

Both WeChat and the Chinese people who use WeChat were born, raised under, and are

currently still heavily influenced by the larger context of China. It is thus crucial to first

learn about this larger context of China to reach a better understanding of the work presented

in this dissertation. In this chapter, I offer an overview of this larger context by discussing

how China has changed during the past four decades and how the internet in China has

developed in this period. Before the end of this chapter, I also present an introduction of

WeChat.

2.1 Changes in Contemporary China: From 1978 to Now

There are various ways to define “Contemporary China.” In this dissertation, for the pur

pose of offering the context of WeChat, I will focus on China from the year of 1978 to now

and refer to this period as Contemporary China. I choose 1978 as a starting point because it

was in that year that China’s leadership started enacting a new foundational policy that has

since altered China widely and deeply: the Reform and OpeningUp (改革开放) policy.

The goal of this policy was to reform China from inside and open up China to the outside

world, so that both Chinese people’s lives and China’s economy could be improved. The

first prominent step taken by the policy — to reform from inside — was to privatize land

and introduce a market.

Introducing a market was radical in China, because the production, distribution, and

consumption of goods were all managed centrally by communes at that time. Individuals

had no right to produce or save products for themselves but had to follow the rules of com

munes. New markets were first introduced in the countryside, where farmers, who owned

no lands and had to hand in their food production to communes, could now own some pri

8

vate lands (divided from previous communes) and sell most of their food production as cash

crops (Hunt, 2003). Money earned from selling crops became the farmer’s private income

which was at their own disposal. Farmers could use money to purchase what they need,

instead of waiting for the distribution of commune. Research found that these changes had

increased China’s agricultural production by 25 percent by 1985 (Hunt, 2003).

Market and privatization introduced in agriculture set a precedent for other parts of the

economy. Not long, other industries, such as light industry, also began to privatize. Dif

ferent from privatizing agricultural lands, which was mostly reforming from the inside,

privatizing other industries was more about opening up to the outside. To push the devel

opment of manufacturing and light industries, the Chinese government attracted foreign

investments by offering more commercial flexibility to Guangdong and Fujian provinces

and designating four Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in these provinces: Shenzhen, Shan

tou, Zhuhai, and Xiamen. In these SEZs, special tax incentives were offered to foreign

investors and more independence was given to the SEZs for conducting international trade

activities. In addition, both sinoforeign joint ventures and completely foreignowned en

terprises were allowed in the SEZs, and production was mainly exportoriented. Research

showed that the SEZs played a major role in “liberalizing the Chinese economy” and had

a prominent positive impact on China’s economic growth (Leong, 2013). Seeing this great

improvement, in mid1980s, the government opened more cities and provinces to foreign

investments.

With its domestic market boosted and flourished, China joined the World Trade Orga

nization (WTO) in 2001, gaining more opportunities to do trade with other countries and

further develop its economy. The consequence is staggering: China’s foreign currency re

serve increased from less than $200 billion to over $2,000 billion between 2000 to 2010,

allowing China to invest abroad further (Trading Economics, 2020). From 1980 to 2018,

China’s gross domestic product (GDP) rose from 191.1 billion to 13.61 trillion, and the

rate of GDP growth remained around 10% per year from 2000 to 2010 (The World Bank,

9

2020). Since the outset of the Reform and OpeningUp policy till 2010, China’s economy

development has been one of the fastest in world history (Mitter, 2008).

The rapid economic development and changes happening within China have lent pro

found influence on all aspects of Chinese people’s lives. First of all is the dramatic increase

of income for almost all Chinese people. Data showed that from mid1980s to mid2000s,

income of the urban Chinese increased by 14.1% and for rural Chinese 11% (Mitter, 2008).

The result of this increase of income was the rise of a new middle class: according to statis

tics, in 2013, 531 million Chinese (39% of the population) were middle class, defined as

having a household income of between 50,000 RMB ($7,250) and 430,000 RMB ($62,500)

(ChinaPower, n.d.). This increase of disposable money in turn created a consumer market

that did not exist before, whose development was directly reflected by the goods and prod

ucts people bought. Before the Reform, goods commonly craved by the Chinese to represent

material success included a sewing machine, a bike, a wristwatch, and a radio receiver (“改

革开放 40年：中国家庭“四大件”的旧貌新颜”, 2018). But as the urban middle class

started to appear and grow after the Reform, the old, agricultureoriented China was often

seen as the past— the future was reimagined as someone living in an urban apartment with

running water and flush lavatory, gaining an undergraduate or even higher educational de

gree, having access to crucial entertainment services (e.g., cable television), and the most

importantly, owning consumer products such as white goods, electronic equipment (e.g.,

phone), and even a car. Being able to purchase and enjoy new material luxuries opened

a whole new world to ordinary Chinese people, providing them further engagements with

foreign cultures and ideologies.

In fact, not long after the Reform started, the Chinese have begun to see, hear, and

experience various foreign cultures and ideas. Japanese and European movies and TV dra

mas were imported; popular music from Taiwan and Hong Kong were circulated and sung

among young Chinese; and since there was no more restrictions on what people could wear,

diverse fashion trends were also explored among the Chinese (see Figure 2.1 as an exam

10

Figure 2.1: An Example of Fashion Trends in China in the 1980s.

ple) (Mitter, 2008). For the first time since the founding of the People’s Republic of China

in 1949, large groups of foreign tourists and students were allowed to visit and study in

China. In the meantime, Chinese people were also permitted to study and travel abroad

(Mitter, 2008). Viewing foreign cultures on television and directly experiencing them by

traveling abroad had both accelerated the spread of new ideologies, for example, individu

alism. A growing emphasis on personal and individual fulfillment could be frequently seen

on popular advertisements, with slogans such as “love yourself more” or “different from

the masses” (Mitter, 2008). All in all, the profound changes happened in China since the

Reform have given the Chinese a freedom to explore and enrich their lives that was previ

ously unimaginable. The introduction and development of the internet offer opportunities

for the Chinese to further expand their horizon, although not in all aspects.

2.2 Internet in China

As the economy developed, technology in China also evolved — both technologies for

largerscale industries and technologies for individual, personal use. Technologies fell into

the latter category were initially represented by telephones and TV, and later mobile phones.

The internet permanently settled itself in China in 1994 (FlorCruz & Seu, 2014); since

then, many domestic internet companies have been founded. To name a few wellknown

examples: Tencent, which is arguably the most famous internet company in China, was

11

established in 1998 and was also the creator of QQ — the most popular instant messaging

software in China prior to WeChat (Tencent, 2018); Baidu, which was found in 2000, built

the largest search engine in China (Baidu, 2018); Sina, founded in 1998, owns one of the

largest Chinese news websites and creates Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter (Sina,

2018). Although these companies had started providing various internet services, from the

1990s till early 2000s, access of the internet in China was largely confined to computers

(instead of mobile phones, which were mainly feature phones at that time), which were

only available at some workplaces, in highincome households, and at uncommon internet

cafes (FlorCruz & Seu, 2014). In addition, internet connection was mostly established via

dialup, which was slow and expensive. Hence, for quite a while after being introduced

to China, the internet remained a luxury to most of the Chinese. Unique to the situation in

China was that while some technologies soon became pervasive (e.g., TV), home computers

have never been widely adopted as they have in the United States (Statista, 2018a, 2018d;

Q.Wang&Li, 2012), and this also contributed to the relatively slow growing rate of internet

access in China (Statista, 2018b).

Instead of accessing the internet via personal computers, most Chinese’s first online

experience was completed on mobile phones (McCarthy, 2018; Statista, 2018c). A mo

bile era began around 2010, as affordable domestic smartphones became widely available

in China. Xiaomi, a company that focused on making quality but lowcost smartphones,

was established in 2010 (Mi, 2018). Huawei, the famous multinational telecommunications

equipment company, also released its first Android phone in 2009 (Huawei, 2018), and it

now occupies the largest mobile phone market share in China (Counterpoint, 2018). With

affordable smartphones and a reliable networking infrastructure, Chinese people could surf

the internet from almost every where at any time (Goldhill, 2013). Since then, functions

that used to be solely available on computers started appearing on smartphones as well —

the difference was that more people were using smartphones now (McCarthy, 2018). For

instance, Taobao (淘宝), the most popular online shopping platform in China, became pop

12

ular first through its website, which was accessed via computers; but later with its mobile

application, it also attracted attention from rural Chinese and has built its popularity among

them (C. Chen, 2018; Freedman, 2017). Further, there were new applications developed

that could not be easily accessed on computers, such as Toutiao, a mobile application pro

viding trending news. WeChat was released at this time. It debuted as a mobile application

in early 2011, though it later provided a computeraccessible alternative version as well

(WeChat, 2011).

One significant move regarding the internet in China was the implementation of “the

Great Firewall (GFW),” a surveillance and regulation project initiated in 2000 (Economy,

2018). It prevented internet users in China (except Hong Kong and Macau) from access

ing certain foreign websites. These websites were identified by the Chinese government

as potentially threatening to the overall good of China, most likely seen from the Chinese

government’s standpoint (J.A. Lee & Liu, 2012; L. L. Zhang, 2006). They included com

mon social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and some other popular news

outlets such as NewYork Times. Google, who refused to conform to the censorship require

ments of the Chinese government, retreated from China in 2010, corresponded to the time

when Chinese people entered a mobile era. Although few websites remained accessible un

der GFW (e.g., Airbnb and LinkedIn, which has a localized version in China), most large,

successful foreign internet services were banned. This firewall thereby also contributed

substantially to the flourish of domestic internet services within China.

Today, a smartphone with a fast internet connectivity has become a musthave for living

in China. While this is in part due to convenience, such as for an ease of shopping online or

chatting with friends, in other ways, a smartphone is truly a necessity — for getting around

in cities where mobile applications are means for paying subway tickets, taxis, and restau

rant checks. Without a smartphone, it is hard to imagine how somebody would get around

in China. In China, this unshakable role of smartphone was achieved through WeChat.

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Figure 2.2: WeChat Landing Page. Figure 2.3: Send an Audio Message in WeChat.

2.3 Introduction of WeChat

WeChat is the most popular mobile social platform in China and the fifth in the world

(Statista, 2020). Up till April 2020, it has accumulated 1.16 billion monthly active users

(Statista, 2020). It is often described as an “allencompassing mobile application” since

it can support all kinds of Chinese people’s needs in their daily lives (Chao, 2017). With

WeChat, users can communicate via text, emoji, image, audio, and video; they can also

pay their utility bills or book restaurant reservations; further, they can even call a taxi on

WeChat or check out books via local library’s WeChat official account. OnWeChat, people

can do things they can or cannot imagine. If one asks a Chinese what mobile application

they use the most often, very likely, their answer will be WeChat (Chao, 2017; Lawrence,

2016).

How did WeChat evolve into an omnipotent application? In 2010, the leader of QQ

mail in Tencent, Xiaolong Zhang, began to develop WeChat with his team, aiming at devel

14

oping a native mobile communication tool for the Chinese (Brennan, 2015). WhenWeChat

was publicly released in early 2011, it was named Weixin (微信), which literally trans

lates to “micro mail.” The newborn WeChat was a simple and even rudimentary mobile

instant messenger (MIM), with few differences from other instant messengers such as Line

orWhatsApp. As anMIM, it ran on smartphones and supported both synchronous and asyn

chronous communication through audio/video call and text/audio messaging. It had some

social features, such as Yaoyiyao (aka Shake) and Piaoliuping (aka Drift Bottle), which al

lowed users to search for and add strangers as contacts (Y. Wang et al., 2015). But these ini

tial social features were tertiary when comparing with WeChat’s instant messenger, where

user’s conversations were listed from the latest to the oldest on the landing page of WeChat

(Figure 2.2). One feature that distinguished WeChat from other messengers from early on

was its audio messaging feature (Figure 2.3). Users could tap the speaker button to the left

of the text input box at the bottom of a conversation, and then press the “Hold to Talk”

button to record an audio message less than a minute. An audio message was sent just as

other text messages, except that it could only be listened to.

Before WeChat, Tencent had already dominated a large portion of the online communi

cation market in China— thanks to QQ (Jucha, 2012; Millward, 2018). Similar to WeChat,

QQ was an instant messaging and social networking application. Launched in 1999, it was

the most widely used online communication tool in China until in late 2010s, when it was

surpassed by WeChat (Law, 2017). Different from WeChat, QQ was developed as com

puter software first and then as a mobile application. It was famous for its membership

system, where users could gain a higher membership status through staying active on QQ

for a longer time and engaging in other QQsupported activities. Even now, many Chinese

can still vividly recall the time when they had fun on QQ (Law, 2017). Yet why did Tencent

invest in WeChat when QQ was already quite successful? Because as the Chinese started

enjoying the internet on mobile devices, the leadership in Tencent observed that Chinese

people needed another simpler, more focused messaging application that was specifically

15

designed for mobile devices (Law, 2017). While QQ had a mobile application, it was not

well redesigned to fit into a mobile environment but more an adaptation from QQ’s com

puter software, which resulted in mobile QQ being clumsy and less intuitive to use. Thus,

Xiaolong Zhang’s idea for creating a new mobile messenger from scratch (i.e., WeChat)

was soon recognized within Tencent. Tencent’s decision was to maintain both QQ and

WeChat, with QQ attracting a younger user group that was expected to naturally migrate

onto WeChat once they grow older, moving outside of college and beginning to work in

professional settings (Y. Chen et al., 2018). In fact, for quite a while, Tencent had been

planning on developing an application for everything that acts as an “internet infrastruc

ture” (Y. Chen et al., 2018). QQ was its first attempt, but it did not and still has not realized

this goal. For Tencent, WeChat had more potential to succeed.

Tencent pushed WeChat to become an allencompassing application with a series of

moves, integrating numerous diverse functions (WeChat, 2019). In late 2011, WeChat

added a video clip function that allowed users to send short video clips. A year later, WeChat

enabled realtime audio and video chats and also introduced Quick Response (QR) codes

and sticker sets. In 2012, WeChat created its own version of online social network, Mo

ments, adding a social layer on top of the existing instant messenger. On Moments, whose

Chinese namemeant “friend’s circle” (Pengyouquan朋友圈), users could post text, images,

short videos, and comment on each other’s posts. However, different from other popular

social media (e.g., Facebook and Instagram) which allowed users to search for and follow

strangers, Moments was created around people who the user has already known in the real

world, because in the beginning, most users’ WeChat contacts were their existing friends

on QQ or phone contacts, and one had to become the user’s WeChat contact first to view the

user’s Moments. In this sense, Moments was not as open as other online social networks,

but it did provide a means for users to move their offline connections online.

The next significant integration was adding official accounts (Gongzhong Hao 公众

号), which also happened in 2012. Official accounts were subscription accounts managed

16

by organizations, corporations, or individual content creators. Owners of official accounts

could edit and publish information as articles and then send these articles as messages to all

the users who follow them. Such a broadcasting feature was often used to distribute news

and other various contents. Besides receiving messages, users could also send messages to

official accounts just like chatting with other individual WeChat contacts, although these

messages could be seen only by the owner of the official account. With official accounts,

WeChat enabled information from outside of WeChat to flow and circulates on WeChat.

While circulating information was important, circulating money was also a crucial goal.

In 2013, besides group chats and games, WeChat introduced the significant WeChat Wallet,

which was a virtual wallet that allowed users to enjoy various financial and commercial

services. On WeChat Wallet, users could connect their bank cards to WeChat Pay and

then complete transactions via QR codes that were either for paying or receiving money,

and these transactions could be internal or external to WeChat (i.e., in the real world). The

introduction ofWeChatWallet certainly pushedWeChat further towards commercialization

(Millward, 2018). Soon after, WeChat digitized the ageold Chinese tradition of Red Packet

(Hong Bao红包, gifting cash during festivals and other significant occasions) and started

supporting money transference among users, allowing users to send and receive money

inside their oneonone or group conversations. Official account owners could also receive

money in their articles through their followers’ tipping. It was also around that time that the

online shopping mall within WeChat — WeChat Store (Weixin Shangcheng微信商城) —

was released. By the end of 2016, WeChat had successfully integrated users, information,

and money all on one single platform.

The most recent attempt to make WeChat even more powerful was through creating

mini programs (Xiao Chengxu 小程序) (Millward, 2018). WeChat previously allowed

official accounts to offer some external services to WeChat users, but these services were

limited due to the interface design regulations of official account. Mini programs were freer

than official accounts in that, on one hand, mini programs permitted developers who were

17

external to WeChat to write their own programs and then attach them onto WeChat (as mini

programs), ready to be used by billions of WeChat users. On the other hand, users could

also enjoy diverse external functions provided bymini programs but still remain onWeChat,

since mini programs had to be accessed from within WeChat. This design decision made

WeChat “stickier” (Y. Chen et al., 2018), as users did not need to leave WeChat for other

applications. With all the moves described above, WeChat succeeded in attracting more

users and persuading them to stay; it also built its own ecology as an influential, gigantic

platform.

As a summary, I categorize the major features on WeChat into six functional sections:

(1) communication, including features for messaging, such as texting and video conferenc

ing; (2) social networking, including Moments; (3) content subscription, including offi

cial accounts; (4) finance and commerce, including WeChat Wallet and features for money

transaction such as Red Packet and WeChat Store; (5) entertainment, including games; (6)

external services, including thirdparty services offered within WeChat Wallet and mini

programs. These sections are mostly distinct, but sometimes they overlap. For instance,

emoji and stickers are both a communication medium and also an entertainment feature.

In addition, these sections are not isolated from each other — many noncommunication

functions, such as money transfer and mini programs, can be accessed in oneonone or

group chats. Although these functional sections have distinct foci, it is more appropriate to

view them as fingers of one hand that collaborate to support the hand functioning well —

WeChat as a holistic mobile application is this metaphorical hand.

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CHAPTER 3

LITERATURE REVIEW

At the heart of this dissertation is an understanding that WeChat, like all the other informa

tion and communication technologies, is largely influenced and shaped by human interac

tions. In great part due to users’ interactions with WeChat, WeChat has gradually moved

from amobile platform to an infrastructure that embeds into people’s everyday life in China.

To contextualize WeChat’s platform infrastructuralization, in this chapter, I first review key

literature in social construction of technology, then introduce different understandings of

platform and infrastructure. After that, I lay out the emerging phenomenon of platform in

frastructuralization (or the infrastructuralization of platforms). In the end, I focus on past

work in HumanComputer Interaction (HCI) that studies the properties of WeChat as a plat

form.

3.1 Social Construction of Technology

Social construction of technology, or SCOT, is a theory that explores the relationship be

tween technology and society: technology does not exist independently in the world; since

its creation and throughout its development, a technology will be influenced, shaped, and

changed by the larger social environment it is in and people who use or relate to it (these

people are often described as “stakeholders” or “relevant social groups.”) SCOT origi

nates from Science and Technology Studies (STS), sociology of scientific knowledge, and

the history of technology (Bijker, 2001). It is a fierce response to technological deter

minism (Kline, 2001), which argues that technology is immune to human or other social

forces’ influence and has the ability to change people and the society without being affected.

SCOT matters in this dissertation because the phenomenon of WeChat moving from a plat

form to an infrastructure is undeniably, although not completely, influenced by people’s use

19

of WeChat and the larger social context around WeChat, meaning this change of WeChat

reflects SCOT. Therefore, SCOT as a theory is a useful and valuable angle to approach

WeChat’s infrastructuralization. I thus leverage SCOT as the overall theoretical underpin

ning of this dissertation.

Social construction of technology and its acronym SCOT were first coined in Vol. 14

of the journal Social Studies of Science, published in 1984 (Pinch & Bijker, 1984). In their

paper, The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: or How the Sociology of Science

and the Sociology of Technology might Benefit Each Other, STS scholars Trevor Pinch and

Wiebe Bijker outlined a program and argued the sociology of technology could learn from

the sociology of science (which focused on the social construction of scientific knowledge),

encouraging scholars to take a “social constructivist view” to understand and study technol

ogy (Pinch & Bijker, 1984). With this call, soon, scholars from different fields with similar

concerns on the social influence and shaping of technology set out to embrace this new lens

of looking at technology. This line of research and discussion continue till this day, and I

provide a few seminal examples below.

One approach of studying the social construction of technology is to find an exemplary

technology, trace its history of development, and find out how relevant social groups played

a role in its evolution. An example of this approach is American historian of technology

Thomas P. Hughes’s analysis on public electricity supply (Hughes, 1999). From Hughes’s

perspective, Edison was the major, decisive social factor: it was Edison who owned a deter

mining vision to publicize the use of electricity in people’s homes and thus he did everything

he could to accomplish this goal. Hughes’s analysis of electricity supply revolved around

one social determinant’s (i.e., Edison’s) experience, which successfully uncovered the crit

ical influence one important social actor could exert on the development of a technology.

However, Hughes paid little attention to other social factors besides Edison. According to

Hughes, the social factors that affected the construction of public electricity were only the

ones related to Edison’s individual experience.

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Instead of focusing on how social factors affect technology (as a unidirectional force),

other approaches of SCOT later looked at how technology and society influence each other.

A classic example is Bijker’s analysis of the development of safety bicycle (Bijker, 1997).

Bijker identified several relevant social groups (e.g., bicycle producers and riders) that in

fluenced the development of the safety bicycle and analyzed the concerns of these social

groups with bicycle, how the development of bicycle responded to these concerns, and how

the social groups were in turn affected by the adjustments of bicycle as well. He followed

the principle of symmetrical analysis, paying equal attention to both the dominant and the

peripheral usages of several variations of bicycles in development. He concluded that after

being influenced and shaped by various social groups, bicycle reached a stability, which

is the common safety bicycle we see today. Bijker’s analysis on safety bicycle embod

ies SCOT as both a theoretical stance and an analytical method. Different from Hughes’s

analysis and other earlier studies on the relationship between technology and society (e.g.,

(Cowan, 1976)), Bijker’s approach emphasizes the coconstructive nature between technol

ogy and society.

Another line of work that falls broadly under the umbrella of SCOT is French philoso

pher Bruno Latour’s ActorNetwork Theory (ANT). ANT explores further into the “social

construction” of SCOT by asking an ontological question: What is social? According to

ANT, what is social is constructed by social actors, which can be either human or non

human (e.g., technology), and the numerous associations among these social actors (Latour,

2005). ANTwas initially formed by Bruno Latour and SteveWoolgar when they studied the

social construction of scientific knowledge (Latour & Woolgar, 1979). By observing how

different actors, such as researchers and apparatuses, played a different role in a science

lab and then shaped the progress of lab activities, Latour and Woolgar argued that scientific

knowledge was produced in the associations of these actors, as they connected and inter

acted with one another to form a network. Comparing with previous approaches of SCOT,

ANT’s understanding of “social” is broader in that social actors (or relevant social groups)

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do not only include humans but also nonhumans, such as technology (however, it is im

portant to note that ANT does not fall under the trap of technological determinism because

it stresses the associations among social actors, denying that actors are independent).

As shown by these examples, SCOT as a theory keeps evolving and approaches under

SCOT could vary with each other slightly depending on their specific focuses. But what

remains unaltered is SCOT’s core tenet that human and the society can influence and shape

technology. This dissertation demonstrates this theory by revealing the role users play in

WeChat’s infrastructuralization process.

3.2 Platform

The term “platform” is commonly used in computing andmedia studies. In computing, plat

form was first seen in the 1990s, around which large tech companies, such as Microsoft,

began to describe their products that supported other applications running on top of them

as platforms (e.g., computer operating systems). When computing scholars started exam

ining platforms more, they formed a line of work called “platform studies” (e.g., (Bogost

& Montfort, 2009; Gillespie, 2010, 2015)), in which computing and media scholars Ian

Bogost and Nick Montfort coined the foundational understanding of platform.

In their Platform Studies: Frequently Questioned Answers, Bogost andMontfort argued

that a platform can be either software (e.g., operating system) or hardware (e.g., computer)

as long as it is reprogrammable, essentially “a computational infrastructure” (Bogost &

Montfort, 2009). Citing a famous software engineer, the cocreator of Mosaic and founder

of Netscape, Marc Andreesen, they defined platform as below:

[A] “platform” is a system that can be reprogrammed and therefore customized

by outside developers — users — and in that way, adapted to countless needs

and niches that the platform’s original developers could not have possibly con

templated (Andreessen, 2007).

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Despite Bogost and Montfort defining platform based on its reprogrammability, plat

form had soon been used by online service providers such as YouTube to present themselves

as a neutral intermediary that offers a space for users to communicate and share information

(Gillespie, 2010). Drawing from this increasingly popular use of platform, in media stud

ies, scholar Tarleton Gillespie argued that a discursive understanding of platform is now

more appropriate for platform (Gillespie, 2010). He examined common usages of platform

and grouped them into four categories: computational, architectural, figurative, and politi

cal. Computationally, platform refers to computing infrastructure that users can reprogram.

Architecturally, platform refers to “humanbuilt or naturally formed physical structures”

(Gillespie, 2010). Figuratively, platform means the foundation of a condition. Politically,

“the issues a political candidate or party endorses as their ‘platform”’ (Gillespie, 2010).

Gillespie found the discursive understanding of platform used by online service providers

to endorse themselves covers meanings from all the four categories above — depending on

the specific context and intention of use.

As platforms keep evolving, they have also attracted attention from fields outside of

computing or media studies. In their book Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets

Are Transforming the Economy — And How to Make Them Work for You, business and

information systems scholars Geoffrey G Parker, Marshall Van Alstyne, and Sangeet Paul

Choudary provided an uptodate definition of platform by focusing on the objective of

platforms (G. G. Parker et al., 2016):

A platform is a business based on enabling valuecreating interactions between

external producers and consumers. The platform provides an open, partici

pative infrastructure for these interactions and sets governance conditions for

them. The platform’s overarching purpose: to consummate matches among

users and facilitate the exchange of goods, services, or social currency, thereby

enabling value creation for all participants.

In this dissertation, I adapt Parker et al.’s definition of platform and define platform as

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a digital technology with an open architecture that designed to facilitate user interactions,

with some rule of governance set by the platform. Thus, technical services that support

user activities with some guidance and rules are platforms — those that allow users to

reprogram (e.g., computers), or those that support users to generate contents (e.g., online

social networks), or those that simply facilitate users completing activities (e.g., ride hailing

services). WeChat as a social application is a platform.

3.3 Infrastructure

To understand the meanings of infrastructure, it is necessary to learn how infrastructure

is developed. Information systems scholars Paul Edwards and colleagues summarized the

three phases of infrastructure development (Edwards et al., 2007).

First, infrastructure begins from systems, which are “linked sets of devices that fill a

functional need” (Edwards et al., 2007), such as a railway system that includes trains and

rails. In the context of computing and information technology, a system can include both

hardware and software. For instance, a computing system includes not only monitors and

keyboards (hardware) but also operating systems (software). When system builders develop

systems, they start with the idea that systems will be used locally by a group of people at

one location to fulfill a specific set of objectives. They do not know if these systems will

become large infrastructures later.

After a system fulfills its initial objectives for users at one location, the next phase in

infrastructure development is to expand the system to multiple locations. Edwards et al.

named this phase “technology transfer and growth” (Edwards et al., 2007), or more briefly,

scaling. Here, a location is not constrained to geographical locations but can be more gen

erally understood as scenarios or contexts where other users use the same system. When

scaling, a system adapts to new locations, including new users, new challenges for imple

menting the system, etc. Oftentimes, a system has to be redesigned slightly to successfully

fit into new locations.

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The last phase is consolidation, in which multiple systems connect to form a network,

or one system defeats all other competitors in the market and thus becomes a monopoly

(Edwards et al., 2007). The former situation happens much more often than the latter in the

history of computer infrastructure development thanks to the assistance of gateways. Gate

ways “allow previously incompatible systems to interoperate” so that heterogenous sys

tems can connect to form a network (Edwards et al., 2007). Examples of gateways include

power converters, HTML, and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). An instance of

a network formed by heterogenous systems and gateways in information technology is the

internet. Networks are infrastructure, whose scope is close to universal in a certain region

(usually in a country). When networks connect across different countries, they form “net

works of networks” that Edwards et al. termed internetworks (Edwards et al., 2007). The

internet becomes an internetwork when it expands globally.

To summarize, both networks and internetworks are infrastructure, while systems are

not. What distinguishes an infrastructure from a system is that the scale of the former is

close to ubiquitous, either within a country or across the globe. In addition, a system does

not start with the intention of growing into ubiquity.

While this classic understanding of infrastructure in information systems focuses on

its scale, another way to perceive infrastructure is through its relationship with human.

Still in information systems, scholars Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder argued that

a technology, as a tool in practice, only becomes an infrastructure in relation to how we

use it; so the right question to ask is “when — not what — is an infrastructure” (Star &

Ruhleder, 1996). They proposed to see infrastructure as a relationship between local and

global (Star & Ruhleder, 1996):

[A]n infrastructure occurs when local practices are afforded by a largescale

technology, which can then be used in a natural, readytohand fashion. It be

comes transparent as local variations are folded into organizational changes,

and becomes an unambiguous home — for somebody. This is not a physi

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cal location nor a permanent one, but a working relation — since no home is

universal.

Based on this understanding, Star and Ruhleder discussed nine qualities of infrastruc

ture: embeddedness, transparency, wide reach or scope, learned as part of membership,

links with conventions of practice, embodiment of standards, built on an installed base, be

comes visible upon breakdown, and fixed in modular increments (Star & Ruhleder, 1996;

Star & Strauss, 1999). These qualities are widely acknowledged and applied in HCI (e.g.,

(Jack et al., 2017; Ribes & Finholt, 2007)).

3.4 Platform Infrastructuralization

3.4.1 Platform vs. Infrastructure: Commonalities and Differences

There are commonalities and differences between platform and infrastructure. For com

monalities, both are for people’s use, and both are foundations to facilitate people’s activi

ties. Platforms are designed to be used by people to fulfill goals. Likewise, infrastructure

supports applications, systems, and activities happening on it.

However, there are fundamental differences between platform and infrastructure that

can help us in critical examination of the sociotechnical context of software such asWeChat.

First is scope. Infrastructure is widespread and close to universal. For example, networks

are infrastructure pervasive within a country; they are accessible to most of the citizens of

this country regardless of these citizens’ socioeconomic status or geographical location.

Similarly, internetworks, such as World Wide Web, is an infrastructure because it is close

to universal around the globe. In contrast, platforms do not have as large scope and reach

as infrastructure. For example, a video game console is a platform (Montfort & Bogost,

2009). It is scoped locally (for video games), designed for local use (play games), and is

practiced by some people (gamers), not all.

The second distinction between platform and infrastructure is that platforms are usually

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part of an infrastructure. Platforms are typically part of a system, or they are systems in

themselves. For instance, a computer is a platform. It can be seen as part of an email

communication system because it is the hardware component for email communication. A

computer can also be viewed as a powerful information processing system in itself because

it contains processor, memory, input devices like keyboard, output devices like monitor,

drivers of these hardware, and many other applications that run inside this computer. When

systems expand to different locations and are later connected via gateways, they then form

infrastructure. Platforms, which are part of systems, are thus part of infrastructure too.

The third distinction between platform and infrastructure is related to their design and

development process. Generally, a platform is designed and developed by employees within

one corporation with target users in mind. Once the platform is released to the market,

users provide feedback to developers and designers, who then iteratively provide solutions

to improve the platform with updates, such as software update packages. For platforms

with reprogrammability, users can reprogram these platforms to meet their own needs.

For platforms without reprogrammability but relying on users to generate content, users

will shape these platforms through the content they share. In summary, when building

platforms, developers and designers know from the outset that these platforms will be con

stantly adjusted and modified later, by their original developers or through external users’

interactions. Hence, when first released, the functions of platforms are not complete nor

comprehensive.

For an infrastructure, it does not start with knowing or allowing users to elaborate or

expand on it; instead, it takes users and their local environments into consideration during

development. Although user feedback is important for infrastructure development, permit

ting user adjustment from the outside is not common. In recent years, however, scholars

have argued for the integration of stakeholder participation (especially user’s) into the de

sign and development process of infrastructure building (thus infrastructuring (Pipek &

Wulf, 2009)). But it is still not a convention for infrastructure or system builders to inte

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grate user elaboration.

In short, although platform and infrastructure share many similarities, they are different

with distinct characteristics and user integration strategies. If one must relate platform to

infrastructure, perhaps it is themost appropriate to understand platforms as a kind of “local,”

“pliable” aspect of infrastructure, since platforms do facilitate user activities but with amore

focused context, welcoming user elaboration.

3.4.2 The Infrastructuralizaton of Platforms

With the proliferation of information technology during the past decade, the line between

platform and infrastructure has blurred, as platforms, such as Facebook, start looking more

like infrastructure. This phenomenon of platform infrastructuralization (Plantin et al.,

2018) has drawn attention from scholars in various fields (e.g., (Kenney & Zysman, 2016)).

Among them is a recent, yet foundational, paper by JeanChristophe Plantin and colleagues,

titled Infrastructure Studies Meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook

(Plantin et al., 2018). By detailing the history of infrastructure studies and platform studies,

and by examining the cases of the internet, Facebook, and Google, Plantin et al. argued that

“platformbased services acquire characteristics of infrastructure” (Plantin et al., 2018).

To support this argument, Plantin and de Seta exemplified how platforms can become

infrastructures with one case study platform — WeChat (Plantin & de Seta, 2019). They

explained WeChat’s infrastructuralization process by pointing out its integration of various

functions and by taking the larger context of Chinese internet development into account.

Relying mostly on secondary sources such as business reports, they identify the significant

determinant in WeChat’s infrastructuralization: the “technonationalist pursuit of cyber

sovereignty” of the Chinese government (Plantin & de Seta, 2019). This means that the

expansion of WeChat is permitted by the Chinese government if WeChat does not chal

lenge the sociopolitical stability defined by the government and allows for the government’s

control and surveillance of its functions and data.

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According to Plantin et al.’s papers, the path for a platform to become an infrastructure

is quite different from how systems form infrastructure. We mentioned earlier that Edwards

et al. highlight two paths for systems to develop into infrastructure: first, there is a more

traditional, common path of connecting heterogenous systems into networks with the help

of gateways; the second, less common path is to win the entire market, defeating all other

competitors (Edwards et al., 2007). The conclusion reached by Plantin et al. was that

platforms like Facebook take the latter, less common path to infrastructuralize, with the

help of their internally developed gateways (e.g., Facebook APIs) (Plantin et al., 2018).

These gateways not only connect to external systems but also build connections among

diverse internal functions, pushing the platform to reach a nearmonopoly. In some cases

like WeChat, platforms also infrastructuralize with the support of the government (Plantin

& de Seta, 2019).

Building on the work on platform and infrastructure (and particularly, Plantin et al.’s

work), in this dissertation, I want to take a humancentered perspective to deepen the under

standing of platform infrastructuralization. As an HCI researcher, what is more interesting

to me, while being less visible in previous literature (Plantin & de Seta, 2019; Plantin et al.,

2018), is the potential role of user in platform infrastructuralization. WeChat is a great case

to study since it has been identified as both a platform and an infrastructure (Plantin & de

Seta, 2019).

3.5 WeChat in HCI

Although WeChat has recently been identified as both a platform and an infrastructure, in

HCI, it has mostly been seen and studied as solely an interactive mobile platform (or more

accurately, an interactive application.) For instance, researchers investigated WeChat’s us

ability (Y. Cheng & Budiu, 2016) and user experience (Y. Cheng & Nielsen, 2016), which

were important aspects for interactive applications. Another common approach HCI re

searchers took when studying WeChat was to focus on how and why people use one or

29

several of its functions. The functionalities researchers studied included emoji and stickers

(R. Zhou, Hentschel, et al., 2017), conversation groups (Qiu et al., 2016; T. Zhang et al.,

2017), audio/video chats (R. Zhou, Wen, et al., 2017), official accounts (X. Liu, 2018), so

cial network Moments (Dai & Wang, 2018; Y. Li et al., 2018), the health tracking feature

WeRun (Gui et al., 2017), Red Packet (Wu & Ma, 2017), and WeChat Wallet (Wu & Ma,

2017).

Besides research that attended to WeChat’s functionalities, there were other studies that

explored WeChat’s influence on people and society more generally, such as people’s mo

tivation of using WeChat (Y. Wang et al., 2015), how WeChat enhanced social practices

(Y. Wang et al., 2016), and how WeChat influenced people’s public involvement (X. Wang

& Gu, 2016). In this dissertation, I also start by taking WeChat as a mobile platform and

investigating how the Chinese use different functions on WeChat, however, with an over

arching focus on how people’s use of WeChat could influence WeChat to move from a

platform to an infrastructure. With this focus, I treat WeChat as a holistic platform (and

in the end, an infrastructure too), on which its various functions come together to assist

WeChat performing as the user needs.

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CHAPTER 4

LONGDISTANCE COMMUNICATION BETWEEN PARENTS AND CHILDREN

I started studying WeChat from its core communication functions in 2015. At that time,

WeChat had incorporated various communication functions besides text and audio messag

ing. A few examples of these functions included short video clips, Red Packets, and also

a social network named Moments where users could easily communicate as well. Build

ing upon previous studies on parents’ and children’s use of information technologies (e.g.,

(Clark, 2014; DiSalvo et al., 2016; Yardi & Bruckman, 2011; Yarosh et al., 2009; Yarosh et

al., 2016; Yarosh et al., 2013)), I wanted to understand the cultural influence of information

technology in people’s communication and chose to studying parent and child communica

tion specifically. Knowing that many Chinese parents used WeChat to communicate with

their children, who were adolescents and studying abroad, I wonder how this communica

tion took place, how different communication media played a role, and what WeChat meant

for these parents and children. During the study, it quickly became apparent to me that this

study was, in fact, centered on WeChat. Because even though the children were in another

country, WeChat was the “home” technology they and their families preferred. This study

offered me a chance to overview various communication media on WeChat and how spe

cific population groups (i.e., parents and their children) used functions on WeChat as these

functions are intended to be used.

4.1 Background

In the past decade, the number of Chinese students studying in the United States has more

than quadrupled (Project Atlas, 2015), and their parents play a large role in their choice

to pursue higher education abroad (Bodycott, 2009). While most of these students start

studying abroad for undergraduate or graduate degrees, some start as early as middle or

31

high school. Therefore, they leave home around the age of 15 to 22 — a crucial time when

adulthood and autonomy are formed. At the same time, because of China’s OneChild

Policy (独生子女政策) enacted from 1979 to 2015, these students are usually the only

child in their nuclear families (BBC News, 2015). It has been suggested that this policy,

coupled with Chinese culture, has resulted in parents holding extremely high expectations

for their child (NPR Org, 2008). The child, on the other side, feels pressure to behave well

and struggles to seek for his/her independence (Fong, 2004; J. Li, 2001). Those children

who study abroad may have more freedom, but their parents still exert their authority in

many ways and rely on the use of communication technologies.

Designing for communication can often be influenced by cultural factors, but I antici

pated that the intimate relationships between parent and child and the crosscultural expe

rience of Chinese students would make the influence of culture on ICT use greater. Thus,

motivated by exploring ICT in the culturally loaded context of intimate family relations

and understanding the possible different uses of a variety of media, I conducted a qualita

tive study with Chinese students studying in a US college and parents of students studying

abroad in China (R. Zhou, Wen, et al., 2017).

4.2 Data Collection and Analysis

This study included two parts. First, I gave nine Chinese college students who were in

the US a weeklong design activity named medium probe (DiSalvo et al., 2016), and then

interviewed them about their communication with their parents in China based on their

responses to the medium probes. Second, I traveled to China and interviewed 15 Chinese

parents, whose only child was studying abroad as an undergraduate or graduate student.

4.2.1 Part One Chinese Students in the United States

The first part of the study was conducted with nine college students (see Table 4.1) attend

ing the same large public university in the United States. Students were recruited through

32

Table 4.1: Study 1 Student Participant Demographics.

Student No. S1 S2 S3 S4 S5 S6 S7 S8 S9Gender F M F F F F F M FAge 22 22 24 21 21 20 19 22 19

snowball sampling. All participants were between 18 to 24 years old, originally fromChina,

and had come to the US in high school or college. We chose this age range to understand if

adolescents who are in their young adulthood would use information technology in unique

ways as they navigate the transition from child to adult (Curtis, 2015), particularly with

parents at a great distance. Of these nine participants, seven were females and two were

males. All the participants were the only child in their families, except S1 who had an elder

sister.

Prior to the interview, we gave each participant a medium probe to help them explore

and reflect on their use of communication media with their parents in China. The medium

probe is a method developed by DiSalvo and Roshan (DiSalvo et al., 2016) to focus on

studying the format of information in different technological media. We were inspired by

their proposal of the medium probe and believed it could be helpful for us. The medium

probe was a kit containing six activities to encourage communication with parents. These

were to be completed on six different days within a week. The kit included a postcard, a

stack of eight pieces of 4” × 6” paperboard, and a ribbon that tied everything together.

The eight pieces of paperboard (see Figure 4.1) consisted of one cover, one general

instructional board, and six activity boards. All instructions on the paperboard were etched

with a laser cutter. Each activity board had one activity, such as “write about your life in

the US on the postcard attached and mail the postcard to your parents.” The goal, similar

to cultural probes (Gaver et al., 2004; Gaver et al., 1999), was to make the kit aesthetically

pleasing and enjoyable for the participants to interact with. We did not seek direct research

findings from the probe but used it as a way to encourage reflection on communication

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Figure 4.1: The Medium Probe Kit.

media. Participants were instructed to complete the activity and then keep notes of their

ideas and thoughts on the piece of paper attached to the back of that board.

Within one week of finishing all the activities, I collected the medium probes, read

through all participants’ notes carefully to understand their media use, and designed follow

up interviews based on these notes. I then interviewed participants oneonone and asked

them to reflect on their experiences of completing these probe activities. I asked them how

they felt about these activities, which communication media they preferred, and how they

communicated with their parents in general. The interviews took place at open spaces or

coffee shops on campus and lasted around half an hour for each. While no formal compen

sation was provided, I offered each one of them a cup of coffee or tea as thanks for their

time.

4.2.2 Part Two Chinese Parents in China

The second part of the study was conducted in Shenzhen. The parents who participated

were all urban and owned their own apartments and cars. With our understanding of the

student participants’ media use in communicating with their parents, we also knew the me

dia parents would be using. Because of this, I chose to focus our study with parents on

how they used media in detail and thus used interviews not medium probes. I interviewed

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Table 4.2: Study 1 Parent Participant Demographics.

Parent No. Gender Age Child’s Gender Child’s Age Child’s CountryP1 F 51 M 24 USP2 F 48 F 22 USP3 M 50 Ma 21 UKP4 F 48P5 M 50 F 21 USP6 F 50 F 22 USP7 F 49 F 19 USP8 F 47 M 19 CanadaP9 F 49 M 22 USP10 M 48 M 21 USP11 F 45 Bothb 20 USP12 F 52 F 21 USP13 M 49 M 21 USP14 F 46 F 20 USP15 F 46 F 20 US

a P3 and P4 are a couple with one son.b P11 has twins.

15 parents about their use of various media when communicating with their children. To

be consistent in what parentchild relationship we were exploring, I recruited parents who

had children within the same age range as our first study, 18 to 24, and who were studying

outside of Asia. As a result, the ages of these parents fell between 46 to 52. Parents were

recruited using snowball sampling as well. Participants (see Table 4.2) included 11 moth

ers and four fathers, with two of them interviewed together as a couple. Only one of the

mothers (P11) had two children, which were twins. Because of cultural norms, I did not

ask for any information about parents’ income level. However, since middleclass families

living in Shenzhen generally own their own apartments and cars, which was reflected in

all the parents we interviewed, we were confident that these parents would be defined as

middle class (Barton et al., 2013). I interviewed them at cafes and each interview lasted

from 30 minutes to two hours. All participants’ children studied in North America with one

exception: Couple P3 and P4’s son studied in the United Kingdom (UK).

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I asked participants about themedia they used to communicate with their children, topics

they discussed, and their wishes. Similarly, no financial compensation was offered, but

I bought tea or juice in appreciation of their time. All interviews were semistructured

and audio recorded. I conducted interviews in Mandarin, both participants’ and my native

language.

4.2.3 Part Three Data Analysis

After interviews were transcribed, they were coded for emergent themes. We followed the

process of thematic analysis (Miles & Huberman, 1994) to code all the transcripts, specif

ically looking for discussions about interviewees’ selection, use, and appropriate on me

dia. We paid close attention to data that addressed the parentchild relationship, including

medium preference, frequency of use, and content of communications. Two other gradu

ate students and I worked on the coding process: First, coding the same three transcripts

individually, one from students and two from parents. When this first round of coding was

complete, we discussed the themes and codes to construct a preliminary codebook. Second,

all three of us coded the remaining onethird of the data separately, adding new codes and

refining existing codes at the same time. After the transcripts were coded, a final codebook

was compiled. We reviewed the transcripts through several iterations using this final code

book resolving discrepancies, and refining codes to ensure that data was coded correctly

and the codes were properly categorized.

4.3 Findings

Findings are broken down to several different subsections: the media used by participants,

ways each of these media was used, and presentations of self constructed by students and

parents. We explore how these presentations of self tied to participants’ media use and the

breakdowns happened in this selfpresentation.

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Table 4.3: Study 1 Communication Media Used by Participants.

On WeChat Other MediaText messaging Phone callGroup chat Skype audio/video chatEmoji and stickers Facetime video chatAudio messaging EmailImage iMessageSight QQVoice callVideo callSharing articlesMoments

4.3.1 Media of Communication

Participants told us they primarily used media on WeChat for communication, although

some other media outside of WeChat were also used sometimes. Table 4.3 summarizes the

media used.

Media on WeChat

In this study, text messaging means sending text messages oneonone, while group chat

is the text messaging that involves more than two people. Emoji and stickers can be sent

either within oneonone conversations or group chats, and because they are pictorial rep

resentations, we categorize them as a unique medium. Audio messages on WeChat are a

maximum of 60 second recordings, generally of speech, sent in a chat. In contrast to text

messages, one cannot copy or forward them to other chats. Sight (aka Xiao Shipin, 小视

频), is the WeChat name for a short video clip, with a maximum length of six seconds1, that

users can record and send within any chats. Both voice calls and video calls on WeChat are

realtime communications that contain two parties. While WeChat does support voice call1After the completion of this study, themaximum length of a short video clip onWeChat has been increased

to 15 seconds.

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that includes multiple parties, this was not used by the participants in this study. Sharing

articles was coded as an independent medium when it is completed in oneonone or group

chat. For example, when A shares an article with B, the preview of this article will show up

as a message in A and B’s chat. In WeChat’s social network Moments, users can post text

and images, as well as share articles — these updates will only be visible to the user’s con

tacts or even smaller groups of contacts, depending on user’s privacy setting of Moments.

We treat Moments as an individual medium even though it includes several formats of me

dia, because Moments is not offered within WeChat’s messenger but as an independent

functional section.

Other Media

Participants used other media outside of WeChat, though far less frequently. These media

included phone calls, email, Facetime video calls, Skype audio or video chat, iMessage, and

QQ (see Table 4.3). While no participants sent letters or postcards habitually outside of our

study, we will discuss the students’ experiences of sending a postcard as one of the activities

of the medium probe. Because almost all media use was onWeChat, in the findings we will

only indicate if a media is not part of the WeChat platform.

4.3.2 Each Medium Has a Role

For participants, each medium had a role of its own. The role of each medium was actively

constructed when using the medium, and sometimes more than one media were used to

form meanings collaboratively.

Media Have Separate Roles

Even though most of the participants relied on WeChat to communicate at the time of our

study, not all of them started usingWeChat when the students first went abroad. Participants

P2, P5, P6, and P8 all said they used to rely on QQ to communicate before WeChat. Other

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media used by our participants at the beginning included Facetime (P2 and P12), phone

calls (P2, P5, P9, P11), Skype (P5), and email (P3). However, over time all participants

settled on WeChat through discussion and practice.

The most used media formats in WeChat were text messaging and video call. Typically,

text messaging was used for casual, informal chats and video call was used for more formal

and scheduled conversations. There were two major constraints participants considered.

The first was time difference. All the participants, except one couple P3 and P4, had a time

difference of at least 12 hours between the child and parent. This time difference made it

difficult for participants to communicate — they simply could not chat through video when

one side was asleep. Four students and nine parents described time difference as a concern

in their communications. Compared with video call, text messaging offered asynchronous

opportunities and freedom. For example, P1 said she would leave text messages for non

urgent communications to her son even if he was sleeping. The second reason contributing

to this distribution of roles between text messaging and video calls was children and parents’

lifestyles. All the children were in school, making them inaccessible through video call

during their daytimes. Most of the parents, except P4, worked outside of the home, meaning

they were also busy during their daytimes. Hence, it was hard for children and parents to

chat on weekdays even though there were overlapping times. Five students (S1, S2, S5,

S6, and S9) and seven parents, (P1, P3, P4, P9, P10, P11, and P15) told us they would

call each other through video mostly on weekends and in China’s mornings (i.e., North

America andUK’s nights). Therefore, video calls were perceived and formed as a scheduled

communication that was used weekly, when both were free to chat facetoface.

The specific roles for video calls and text messaging were constructed, imposing strong

influences on the topics discussed through them. S4 and P9 described how they talked

about serious topics only through video call, since these topics often ended up eating such

a great amount of time that it would be easier for children and parents to just talk, instead

of typing down words. As P9 said, “We talk about casual things via text messaging. If

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we want to talk about formal business, we will just video chat. Usually it will run more

than half an hour and sometimes even over an hour.” She then told us that her son recently

chatted with her husband, the father, extensively about South China Sea issues through

video call. However, while conversations on video chat were often casual or amix of serious

and casual topics, text messaging, was rarely used for talking about serious topics. Topics

transmitted through textmessagingwere various, including news, funny jokes, everyday life

events and sometimes quick updates on finance, and so on. Thus, in this case, the content

of communication and the medium of communication were closely connected. Kayan et

al.’s study showed that Asian users, who were influenced by their cultures, preferred video

chatting more (Kayan et al., 2006). Our participants offered some specific reasons for this

choice and illustrated that such a choice might not be made due to culture.

Other media have their roles as well. Voice call, similar to a phone call but connected

via the internet, was usually perceived as a backup or an alternative for video call by our

participants. For instance, S6 said she would initiate voice call only for emergency situa

tions. If the internet stability became a problem, S9, P6, P9, and P10 would compromise

by using voice call instead.

Group chat included the nuclear family group of the parents and child or extended family

groupswith other relatives. P9 and P15 told us that their children rarely sent anymessages in

their extended family groups. P6, P8, and P13 said their children would only send greetings

in extended family groups during festivals or holidays. Email, in contrast to how extensively

it is used byWestern users (Tang et al., 2009), was solely used by our participants when they

had to transmit important files, such as visa documents (P10), financial information (P14),

or identification documents (P8, P15). Because participants rarely used email and because

of the rapid penetration of smartphones and WeChat in China, email was not a common

communication tool amongst our participants.

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Media Have Collaborative Roles

Our participants did not only assign roles to the individual medium but also used multiple

media together to construct meanings. One common use of text messaging by six students

and six parents was that they sent out text messages to check if the other side was available,

and then initiated either video or voice calls. This finding is consistent with previous studies

(Judge & Neustaedter, 2010). Here, the message transmitted by text messaging was only a

signal — the family would proceed to “real” communication only after the signal was sent

and both sides confirmed their availability. Text messaging thus became the early entrance

to video or voice chat. Another example of using text messaging and voice calls together

was offered by P14. Different from others, P14 preferred sending audio messages because

talking was faster than typing. But she did mention an exception:

But if we are going to talk about formal and serious things, then I will usually

write them down in bullet points such as one, two, and three, and send them

via text messages. After that, we will use voice call to chat. (P14)

In this case, text messages no longer acted like signals, but as a reminder or agenda that

P14 would later refer to during the voice call in case she missed anything she wanted to

discuss. Contents sent by text messages were still active in the sense that they would be

revisited in the voice call. All the findings presented above show what Setlock and Fussell

found: Asian users do make deliberate choices when concerning how media can best fit the

context (Setlock & Fussell, 2010).

4.3.3 Presentation of the Child: An Independent Adult

Both student and parent interviews suggested that the students worked hard to construct a

positive image as an independent and mature adult in front of their parents.

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Report Only the Good

In Chinese, there is a saying to describe the consistency of one’s behavior when one reports

only the good but not the bad, called “Bao Xi Bu Bao You” (i.e., 报喜不报忧). All the

student participants said this was the principle they followed when talking to their parents,

similar to what have been found by Pan et al. (Pan et al., 2013). S9, currently a freshman,

said she would not share any negative news about herself with her parents unless she ab

solutely had to. She explained to us that she adopted this behavior when she went abroad

as a highschool student. S1, describing herself as a typical reportonlythegood person,

said she would send text messages in their nuclear family group every single day to let her

parents know she was safe and sound.

Photos sent as images through WeChat were also used as a tool to express positive self

image by children deliberately. S4 told us she sent images to her parents very often and she

particularly loved sending pictures of the dishes she cooked, demonstrating she could cook

foods on her own. We asked her if she would also send photos of dishes she ate outside,

she answered, “No, except when I eat something extremely delicious. I will want to share

with them, like ‘hey, I ate this and it’s awesome.’ But in most of the cases, I will only send

photos of the foods I cook.”

This was echoed by 10 parents because their children also sent photos of food they

cooked. By sending images of the foods they cooked, the students revealed a sign of their

independence and offered proof of living happily abroad. Other than foods, S4 sent selfies

to her parents too, even though they talked very often via video call. Photos were also sent

by S7 when she was traveling, updating her whereabouts, and sharing beautiful scenery. In

P15’s case, images were also used by her daughter, an interior design major, to show off her

school projects. P15 saw this as evidence of her daughter doing well at school. Photos play

a crucial role to display the positive selfimage constructed by the children — a picture is

indeed worth a thousand words. A more indirect and subtle way to construct a positive self

image was tied to extend family group chat messages mentioned earlier. Children sending

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out greetings and blessings on festival or holidays in extended family groups demonstrated

to their family that they were polite and caring to other relatives.

Share Concerns, but Only Selectively

Children worked hard to keep a positive selfimage before their parents, hence they rarely

shared their concerns with their parents. We found, from S4, S6, and P11, that when the chil

dren shared their concerns, they shared them selectively, both in terms of with whom they

shared and the content they discussed. P11 told us without being asked that her daughter

sometimes would share things with her but not her husband. “Usually about relationships,”

she added. S6 agreed that she would talk about relationships with her mother but not in the

family group where her father was presented. S4 explained this from a daughter’s stand

point: “For example, I’m going to live with my boyfriend later and rent a new apartment.

So, I only discuss this with my mom but not my dad. Dad won’t allow it [laughs]. He

doesn’t know I have a boyfriend.”

A Busy Student

Interviews with parents indicated that students constructed an image of themselves as hard

working and busy. P1, P5, P6, P7, P9, and P15 all said their children were obsessed with

schoolwork. P7 and P15 described their daughters as “busy during the day because she has

to attend classes.” P6’s daughter told her straightforwardly that she had her own work to

do and had no time for random chatting. In contrast to the parents, S7 was the only student

who openly mentioned that she was busy, when explaining the reason for her not reading

the articles shared by her mom: “I’m busy, you know, and simply don’t have time to read

them.” However, she later told us she was busy because finals were approaching — she

was usually not busy at all as a freshman. This contradiction of S7 suggests the students

may not be as busy as they present themselves to their parents.

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Avoided or Neglected Media

To protect their image, some of student participants avoided using certain media to com

municate with their parents. For example, S3, a graduate student who had been away from

home for two years, said, “I don’t like sending text messages. It’s like leaving evidence. I

probably don’t want to communicate too much with my parents via text, like writing letters

or emails. My grandparents sent emails to me before and I felt awkward, and didn’t know

how to respond. My grandpa used to write poems for me. Awkward. I used to write blogs

when I was a little kid, and when my parents saw the posts they made a fuss. So, I don’t

like writing online.”

Text messaging and email were not the only media avoided by participants. Participant

S5 sometimes set the visibility of Moments, the WeChat social network, so it could not be

seen by her parents. S4 said she did not block anybody from viewing her social updates

on Moments but would not post her concerns there if she did not want her parents to see.

S6 did not complete any activities listed in the medium probe by using Moments because

“I don’t use it to talk to my parents.” While Moments has common functions that most

social networks provide, such as commenting and liking a post, these students intentionally

avoided using Moments to reveal part of themselves to their parents.

We tried to capture data about nondigital communication by including in the medium

probe a postcard of the students’ campus — stamped and ready to be sent. Most students

did not use the postcard — even with instruction to use it. Students told us the postcards

were awkward, formal, and could be seen by strangers. While some might send them to

friends, they would not send them to their parents.

4.3.4 Presentation of Parents: Caring but Not Annoying

Similar to students, parent participants constructed their own image as a caring but not

annoying mother/father. This was clearly shown through their use of media.

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A WellBehaved Parent

Most of parent participants showed they cared about their children by being wellbehaved

in their children’s eyes — they used communication media their children preferred (P11),

they did not disturb their children when they were busy (e.g., P1), and they replied to their

children’s messages and fulfilled their wishes as soon as possible (e.g., P3). As P5, a retired

father of a junior undergrad student, said, “We (P5 and his wife) are pretty flexible and

relaxed because we are both retired. But we don’t dare to bother her. She has so many

exams, those monthly tests.”

This was echoed by other parents (P1, P2, P9, P12, P14). They told us they knew and

understood their children were busy with schoolwork, so they supported their children by

not contacting them when the children did not have time. In addition, parents were willing

to schedule their time around their children’s availability. P1 shared with us: “We used to

chat around 11 AM on my Saturdays (i.e., China’s time) in his first year abroad. Later we

changed it to Sundays, because we thought it would be more convenient for him, since it

would be his Saturdays.”

However, when their children were free or needed help from them, they responded

quickly and tried to demonstrate how much they cared about their children. A typical ex

ample was when the children were in need of money. P2’s daughter had mentioned she was

traveling to Germany and needed money; “So I sent her money right away.” P11 and P15

also mentioned that when their children asked for money, they would help at any time. P3,

a father with his son studying in the UK, sent text messages or recorded videos for his son

when being asked how to cook a dish. P7 told us her family had a dog. It was a gift for her

daughter when she was in middle school, because she had done well on an important exam.

Her daughter cared for the dog a lot and missed it very much after going abroad, often ask

ing P7 to send her Sights of the family’s pet. Sights, as mentioned earlier, are sixsecond

video clips. Such a request was not something P7 could reject — she sent Sights only for

her daughter to see the pet. Sights are more flexible than video chat — viewing them does

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not require both ends to be available at the same time because they are sent as messages.

As video clips, Sights can still capture all the lively motions and sounds and were effective

in sharing the dog with P7’s daughter.

While Smith et al. believed that the medium used for parentchild communication was

mainly based on the parents’ willingness and ability (Smith et al., 2012), our parent partic

ipants behaved the opposite: they placed their children’s preferences and schedules among

top priorities and used the media their children liked.

“I Don’t Worry about My Kid.” Really?

Many of the parent participants, including P2, P3, P5, P7, and P9, said they did not worry

about their children. However, other statements suggest this might not be true all the time.

For example, even though P2 said she had seen her daughter’s dorm and chatted with her

daughter’s advisor so she did not worry about her daughter, she was the one who initiated

the video call with her daughter most of the time. This was also the case for P3, P5, P7, and

P9. P6, a mother, when being asked whether her husband worried less about their daughter

than her, answered, “Yes, definitely. It’s pretty obvious. He doesn’t talk much when we

video chat [with our daughter]. Maybe men don’t have much to say. But he does notice

and remember everything. Sometimes when I’m on the computer, I will see all the photos

he saved — he saves photos sent by our daughter, but he never says anything.”

Thus, even if P6’s husband did not talk a lot, there were indications he cared and worried

about his daughter in other ways — supported by technology since he could save images

sent by his daughter. Similarly, when we asked P3 and P4, the only couple we interviewed,

whether they worried about their son, P3, the father, quickly answered no, since “it’s too

far away for us to help him.” Although the mother P4 did not disagree with her husband,

she revealed her worry later in our conversation. She asked her son to send her pictures of

his room because she wanted to see if the room was tidy. Similar to parents wanting to see

their children to make sure they were okay, images of food children cooked together with

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other positive messages were reassurance for the parents.

Wish to Talk More

Many parents (P2, P6, and P9) asking us if they were “normal” in the amount they contacted

their children. While we reassured them they were “normal,” this question did highlight

that even though these parents worry and care about their children, they struggled to ensure

they were “normal” parents, in terms of how often they contacted with their children. We

concluded our interviews by asking parents if they wished to talk to their children more

often. P1, P3, P4, P6, P7, and P15 answered yes firmly. As P7 said, “Of course I would

love to chat with her more. But there’s a time difference and all her class stuff. It’s not very

convenient.” Therefore, even though parents worked hard to not to disturb or annoy their

children, they indicated their sincere hope was to chat with their children more often, which

is different from what have been found by Pan et al.: both parents and children wanted to

chat more (Pan et al., 2013).

4.3.5 Breakdowns of SelfPresentations

The presentations of self among our participants included children presenting themselves

as independent adults and the parents presenting themselves as caring but not annoying

mothers/fathers. While they succeeded in presenting themselves in these ways most of the

time, they occasionally failed. The failures marked the breakdowns of their presentation of

self.

As part of the medium probe, we asked student participants to “Please share with your

parents about something you are worrying about now.” S1, a firstyear master student, noted

on the back of the paperboard this activity that her parents “overreacted.” In the interview

she explained:

You asked me to tell them something I was worrying about. I thought for quite

a while because I never shared such things with them. I then sent this message:

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“I don’t want to gain weight!” But they didn’t reply. Later I sent something

like “Sigh, I’m worried that I can’t find a job.” Guess what? They replied right

away, asking me what I was thinking and such. A few days later we talked over

the phone and I guess my Dad remembered this, because he told me “just come

back [to China] after you graduate, don’t worry about job or Ph.D.” I feel they

changed their attitude after I sent that message. (S1)

While S1’s selfpresentation broke down because of prompts in the study, other images

were found to be inconsistent during everyday communication. Oftentimes, WeChat’s so

cial network Moments was involved. P8, a mother who could see her son’s updates on

Moments, told us she would usually reply to them: “Sometimes I don’t really understand

or am not interested in the stuff he sent. But I will leave a comment like ‘Why are you

still sending these things? It’s late. Go to bed.” It was because P8’s son had updated on

Moments that P8 was able to see he stayed awake at late nights — perhaps not something

he should be doing according to his mother.

Some students blocked their parents because of such comments. S7 blocked her Mom

on Moments because “she saw my updates before and found me and talked about them.

Really annoying. So I decided to block her.” We do not know exactly what prompted S7’s

mother to talk to them about their post, but S7’s mother was no longer considered well

behaved but annoying from S7’s standpoint. P1, P7, and P13 were all aware that they were

blocked by their children. P1 and P13 said they could not see anything from her respective

son’s Moments. When P1 asked her son about this, he simply answered that he never posted

anything. She told us, “I really doubt that.” P7’s case was slightly different because she got

her daughter’s news from other parents:

We have [WeChat] groups with parents. Once one of the parents told me,

“Looks like your daughter is having fun.” That parent also has my daughter’s

WeChat [account added] so she can see my daughter’s updates on Moments.

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However, I can’t see. I would know nothing about my daughter’s update, if

that parent hadn’t told me. (P7)

When parents realized they were blocked by their children, they would think about why

theywere blocked andwhat the childwas hiding from them. Asmentioned previously, some

students would deliberately avoid using Moments when it became a tool to communicate

with their parents. Other students’ image broke down when their parents knew that they

were blocked from viewing their child’s posts on Moments.

Finally, one might not even care about his/her presentation, and in one case technology

helped to highlight this. As described by S8, an undergraduate senior student, his Mom

required him to call him through QQ video chat every day. He shared more details with

us: “She wants to see me every single day. Yes, every day. I have no choice. However, I

can’t see her because she doesn’t have a camera installed. She uses her desktop computer

to video chat with me. She can see me but I can’t see her, so I usually do something else at

the same time. Otherwise, I’ll have to face a blank screen.”

S8, although complying with this “requirement” of his mother, wished he could see his

mother in the video, even though his mother did not care about getting a camera. We asked

why she did not use mobile phone and S8 said it was because the phone screen was too

small. S8’s Mom, although clearly an engaged mother, considered little about her son’s

view. If her goal was to construct an image of a mother who was caring but not annoying,

we wonder whether her use of technology had betrayed her.

4.4 Discussion and Contribution

Two primary themes emerged from the findings: first, understanding how the choice of

medium was a negotiated activity that allowed parents and children to convey nuanced

messages with their words and images. Second, parents and children were concerned with

selfpresentation and used technologies tomanage that presentation. In the end, I also reflect

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on how findings from this study inform the understanding of user’s interaction withWeChat

as a platform.

4.4.1 “The Medium Is the Message”

In the Findings, we detailed how students and parents relied on text messaging and/or video

call on WeChat to communicate. What made them settle on these media? They experi

mented with various media in their communication and established their communication

norms through adjustments. These norms included the medium used, how multiple media

were used collaboratively, the communication time and duration, and topics discussed via

a certain medium. Gradually, parents and children arrived at an understanding of the role

each medium plays in their communications. They expected the other side to know the role

played by medium as well — namely, the message is carried by the medium, as McLuhan

famously said, “The medium is the message” (McLuhan, 1964).

The message is also influenced by the parents’ and students’ use of WeChat. As a

social platform, WeChat is an allencompassing system for users (Lawrence, 2016), but

for overseas students, WeChat is home — WeChat is the tool to use when communicating

with parents and families in the home country. Thus, WeChat, as a communication medium,

also embeds nuanced messages of belongingness and homeland. Hence “The medium is the

message” (McLuhan, 1964) is reflected on two levels, one for each medium on WeChat,

and the other for WeChat as a whole.

4.4.2 Chinese Culture and the Presentation of Self

In this study, all students indicated that they only reported the good but not the bad, as the

Chinese saying “Bao Xi Bu Bao You” says. The students strived to present themselves as

independent adults in front of their parents and in some cases leveraged privacy settings

and multiple platforms to save face and hide aspects of their life overseas.

Similarly, the parents also framed their selfimages as a wellbehaved and not a nag

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ging mother/father. The effort brought in to sustain these presentations can be understood

in context of Goffman’s ideas of “expressions given” and “expression given off” (Goff

man, 1959), the pervasive Chinese culture of face saving (Hwang, 1987), which is the kind

of effort made to maintain and protect a positive selfimage among other people (Upton

McLaughlin, 2013), and China’s OneChild Policy. Because the overseas students were

the only child in their families, their parents may have high expectations for them (Fong,

2004). In the meantime, since the child was far away in another country, the parents had to

work hard to manage how such expectation was displayed so it would not leak inappropri

ately and make their child annoyed or stopped contacting them. By following the rules of

communication negotiated with their children, they saved face for themselves even if they

desired more communication.

The medium, thus, carried a serious role of expressing selfimage in such a culture

laden online space. The use of different media can lead to a consistent selfimage but also

breakdowns, as mentioned earlier. “Many crucial facts lie beyond the time and place of

interaction or lie concealed within it,” said Goffman (Goffman, 1959). Here, the media, the

culture, and the presentation of self all connect to form a space of interaction for parents

and children.

4.4.3 Understanding User’s Interaction with WeChat

In this study, participants used communication and social networking functions on WeChat

to keep in touch with their families. Participants chose to use WeChat because WeChat, as

one single application, integrated various communication and social functions which made

it easier for them to communicate with their children or parents in ways they preferred.

Although participants assigned diverse meanings to media onWeChat and used these media

to fulfill their own purposes of communication (e.g., constructing positive selfimages), in

essence, participants used these media on WeChat in ways these media were designed to

be used. Thus, participants’ interactions with WeChat in this study conformed to WeChat’s

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design intention: they are within the expectation of WeChat as a communication and social

application.

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CHAPTER 5

COMMUNICATION VIA EMOJI AND STICKERS

My second study looked into how and why Chinese people send emoji and stickers on

WeChat. Emoji (see Figure 5.1) are pictorial representations for facial expressions and

other common, mundane objects (Blagdon, 2013). They originate from Japan and are used

in online communication widely (Sugiyama, 2015). Stickers (see Figure 5.2) are similar to

emoji as they are also pictorial representations. However, compared with emoji, stickers are

larger in dimension, being either static or animated, and theymust be sent separately without

insertion in text messages (while emoji can). OnWeChat, emoji are builtin and thus cannot

be added or deleted, while stickers can. Two types of stickers are supported by WeChat:

customized stickers and downloadable ones offered in WeChat’s sticker gallery. Stickers

in sticker gallery are presented in “sets,” where each sticker set represent a cohesive theme

and contains 16 or 24 individual stickers (see Figure 5.2 as an example set). Customized

stickers are individual ones uploaded by users from other sources outside of WeChat. Once

uploaded to WeChat, these customized stickers can circulate among WeChat users.

Past research in the fields of ComputerMediated Communication (CMC) and HCI has

studied emoji and other similar elements such as emoticons (e.g., <3 as heart). By 2016,

CMC researchers had focused mostly on emoticons’ nonverbal cues (Derks et al., 2008;

Lo, 2008) and their other illocutionary uses (Dresner & Herring, 2010; Jibril & Abdullah,

Figure 5.1: A Subset of All the Emoji on WeChat.

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Figure 5.2: An Example of Sticker.

2013), while HCI research on emoji use was still in its early stage of development (J. Y.

Lee et al., 2016). Since emoji were getting more popular in online communication around

2016, I was motivated to study them and understand their novel use. China was one of the

countries where emoji and sticker first began to flourish, and because WeChat was the most

popular mobile instant messenger in China, the Chinese were seen frequently sending emoji

and stickers onWeChat— I thus chose to study how the Chinese send emoji and stickers on

WeChat. This study contributes to the understanding of user’s interaction with WeChat by

revealing and investigating a wide variety of previously unstudied appropriations of emoji

and stickers (R. Zhou, Hentschel, et al., 2017).


I conducted 30 indepth, semistructured interviews of individuals from three different field

sites in southern China: Zhijiang county (芷江) and Huaihua (怀化) in Hunan (湖南)

province, along with Shenzhen (深圳) in Guangdong (广东) province. Huaihua is a small

town that lies on the west side of Hunan. Zhijiang county is a part of Huaihua, containing

301 villages. I visited three villages there and use “Zhijiang county” to refer to them all.

My last site was Shenzhen, one of the most developed cities in China. This selection of

sites gave the study a reasonable demographic spread across rural, small town, and urban

China. All the participants were recruited using a combination of purposive and snowball

sampling (Goodman, 1961; Seidman, 2006).

As seen from Table 5.1, participants were between 18 and 63 years old. This was be

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Table 5.1: Study 2 Participant Demographics.

No. Gender Age Locationa Smartphoneb Years of Smartphone Use Years of WeChat UseP1 F 51 Small town Huawei 2+ 2P2 F 54 Small town Samsung 3 2.5P3 F 52 Small town Samsung 5+ 1.5P4 F 61 Small town Samsung 5+ 1.5P5 M 25 Small town iPhone 7 3+P6 M 58 Small town Samsung 4.5 2.5P7 F 52 Small town iPhone/Xiaomi 4.5 2+P8 F 18 Small town Huawei 4.5 0.5P9 M 42 Rural OUKI 5+ 2P10 M 63 Rural Samsung 2+ 2P11 M 27 Small town iPhone 6 4P12 F 28 Small town Samsung 7 4P13 F 54 Small town Coolpad 1+ 0.5P14 F 23 Rural iPhone 2.5 2.5P15 F 25 Rural Oppo/Unknown 4+ 3P16 M 43 Rural Gionee 4+ 4+P17 F 43 Rural Vivo 0.5 0.5P18 F 54 Rural Huawei 3 3P19 F 26 Urban Hammer 8 4P20 M 63 Urban iPhone 5 5P21 F 59 Urban iPhone 5+ 4.5P22 F 39 Urban Huawei 5 3.5P23 F 47 Urban Huawei 1.5 1.5P24 M 25 Urban iPhone 6 6P25 M 27 Urban Xiaomi 3 3P26 M 27 Urban iPhone 10 5P27 M 41 Urban iPhone 10+ 3P28 M 27 Urban iPhone 6.5 4P29 F 26 Urban iPhone 5.5 4.5P30 F 25 Urban Samsung 8 4

a Rural→ Zhijiang; Small town→ Huaihua; Urban→ Shenzhenb Other than Samsung and iPhone, other smartphones were all Chinese branded. P7 and P15 both owned twosmartphones.

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cause we were keen to study use across ages. Our sample included 12 men and 18 women.

Since WeChat only operates on smartphones, we needed to impose smartphone use as a

criterion for participation in our study. This ruled out several potential participants in our

rural field sites.

The first 18 interviews were conducted in Hunan: seven in Zhijiang and 11 in Huai

hua. I then interviewed 12 participants in Shenzhen, the urban city. All interviews were 30

to 60 minutes long and took place at participants’ homes, and no compensation was pro

vided. The interviews took place in Mandarin, which is my native language and the official

language in China. During each interview, I first asked participants for their basic informa

tion, such as their age, devices they used, and how long they had been using WeChat and

smartphones (see Table 5.1). I proceeded by asking if they had used emoji on WeChat and

how. I also observed emoji on their phones and how they used them. I took notes and kept

audio recordings when interviewing. I transcribed all the transcripts in Mandarin and then

translated them to English for analysis.

I applied interpretive qualitative analysis to all interview transcripts (Merriam, 2002).

The analysis began with open coding (Charmaz, 2006b), in which I assigned short phrases

as codes. The first round of coding was done linebyline within transcripts, so that codes

stayed close to data. I proceeded to analyze the firstround codes and extracted themes for

a conceptual understanding. The process of analyzing data was iterative that I continuously

went back and forth between categories and data to discover patterns and subject data to

further scrutiny. Finally, I arrived at distinct themes that highlighted how participants started

using emoji/stickers and how they used or did not use these.

5.2 Findings

Findings from this study are structured by describing how people used emoji/stickers to

support and complement their use of text, how emoji/stickers were sent in collaborationwith

a cultural symbol “Red Packet,” how emoji/stickers represented users’ identities, and how

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these use cases have evolved over time such that emoji/stickers have taken on meanings of

their own and therefore generating subcultures. I present various ways people democratized

stickers and those who did not engage with emoji/stickers as well. Other findings that are

more closely related to platform infrastructuralization will be reported in Chapter 9.

5.2.1 Emoji/Stickers for NonVerbal Cues

We found participants engaged with emoji because emoji offer nonverbal cues that are

poorly conveyed by text. In general, when communicating emotions, expressions, feelings,

greeting, blessings, and appreciation, they used emoji extensively as nonverbal cues and as

“emotion indicators” (Dresner & Herring, 2010). Most participants told us they sent emoji

when they felt happy or when they wanted to bless or greet someone along with words for

a livelier exchange. This role of emoji also reveals how people intentionally add them to

text. For instance, P22 described how she sent emoji at the end of a sentence to help her

show happiness. Here, emoji support text without introducing new meanings, serving a

more supplementary role by adding nonverbal cues.

Stickers also serve similar function. In WeChat, stickers can either be solely graphical

or contain both an image and text. Typically, there are one to ten characters in a single

sticker, depending on the information it is trying to convey and whether the meanings of

the text and image are aligned. A few participants believed that stickers with text are “clear

and complete,” because they contain words that people cannot misunderstand. Their main

focus was on the text and not the image, which ended up playing a supplementary role.

5.2.2 Emoji/Stickers for Complementing Text

Emoji/stickers also offer important information to complement the text so that emoji/stickers

and words can collaborate to form holistic meanings. In some cases, text may not even be

present.

Certain types of messages are easier to convey when complemented by stickers than

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by inputting text (J. Y. Lee et al., 2016). Behaviors, actions, and attitudes fall into this

category. P1 shared how she often sent emoji hugs to her middle school classmates since

she would really like to hug them in person. Nearly half of our participants told us they

send emoji to express agreement or disagreement.

When stickers are used for adding connotative information, they complement text with

meanings it failed to convey. When describing the kind of stickers he saved, P11 said,

“Some connotative stickers, such as ‘give you a look and you understand it on your own.’

Also, ones that feature ‘moral integrity shattered all over the place.”’ Though the stickers

he referred to were customized stickers, they embedded meanings that were rich, subtle,

and culturally relevant, so they would likely be very hard to express through text. In these

cases, a picture was indeed worth the proverbial thousand words.

Emoji/Stickers can also modify the meaning of text. We observed and discussed with

participants how they used emoji/stickers to alter the meaning of text intentionally. P1 said,

“Sometimes when it’s not appropriate to say something or when you don’t have a proper

word in mind, stickers will help you to communicate. For example, Zhijiang people use

‘the brainchopper’ to curse people. But if you really use this word, it sounds pretty seri

ous. Use a knife [emoji], then it becomes entertaining.” This finding differs from Walther

and D’Addario’s since they believe the negative element, whether verbal or graphical, will

make the entire message negative (Walther & D’Addario, 2001). P1, instead, used emoji

to lighten the negative tone. P19 shared similar feelings here by telling us she makes sure

to add an emoji if she believed her text could potentially hurt those on the receiving end.

These examples highlight that users must understand the meanings of both the text and the

emoji/stickers, and well enough, to balance their holistic meaning in diverse situations.

One third participants said they use emoji/stickers when they had nothing to say or did

not know what to say. P8’s reply fell into the former category: “I usually use stickers when

the conversation becomes awkward. This means there’s no way to proceed.” P5 also used

emoji when he did not want to talk, which happened frequently when he chatted with his

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Figure 5.3: Traditional Paper Red Packets.

Figure 5.4: Digital Red Packets in a WeChat Group Conversation.

older family members. P19 described her use of emoji when she was unsure of what to

say. All these participants show that this particular use depends on specific audience and

context.

5.2.3 Emoji/Stickers Collaborates with Red Packets

A red packet is a red paper packet used to gift cash (see Figure 5.3). Chinese people tra

ditionally give them to children as a blessing during the Chinese New Year, but nowadays

Figure 5.5: Various Stickers Featuring Red Packets.

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they are sent in other situations as well, such as weddings, birthdays, etc. Tencent digitized

red packets (see Figure 5.4) for WeChat in January 2014 to support an online experience

of this cultural tradition (Wu & Ma, 2017). 14 participants told us they use emoji/stickers

when expecting, sending, or receiving red packets and that these emoji/stickers generally

take the form of stickers featuring red packets, similar to the examples shown in Figure 5.5.

One example was P23, who claimed (and we confirmed) that most of her stickers featured

red packets.

Besides stickers that feature Red Packets, we also discovered many other emoji/stickers

were used only on certain occasions, such as festivals or holidays, carrying and transmit

ting distinct cultural meanings. These emoji/stickers must be understood by taking into

consideration both the special contexts and the traditional cultural value ascribed to them.

5.2.4 Stickers Represent One’s Identity

Emoji/Stickers are not used solely for communication; they are also representations of one

self. Our research found that participants used stickers as a part of their personal identity,

regardless of age and location. For example, P11 shared that after becoming a cop, he had

become much more aware of his occupation and was keen that his online communication

preserve his professional image. Some of his contacts on WeChat were strangers who only

talked to himwhen they wanted his help. He showed us multiple saved stickers that featured

cops and told us that he had gotten these from his colleagues.

Other than profession, participants showed awareness of their personality traits and how

they conveyed these using stickers. P8, who had just graduated from high school, told us

she liked stickers that were “silly and also a bit funny,” which (to her) meant that they looked

simple and straightforward. When being asked why she chose those stickers, she answered,

“Probably because my personality is like them, and I like this simple style since I was

very young.” These stickers spoke to her because they resonated with how she understood

herself. P12 said she sent a particular set of stickers to her female friends in which the

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characters looked “capricious and unhappy,” because she felt free with these friends. Here,

stickers were used with the intention of revealing aspects of oneself with different audiences

— this is also how people act in the real world (Goffman, 1959). If the audiences know the

sender, they will be able to understand the connection between the sender and the stickers.

Otherwise, the audiences can get to know the sender through these stickers, making stickers

even more crucial in this communication.

Finally, users also choose stickers because they resemble their physical features. P5

used a sticker just because people thought he looked like the character in the sticker. He

provided more details: “Whenever I send this sticker, particularly smiling like this at the

end a conversation, people will say ‘hey this guy really looks like you’ or ask me ‘are you

this guy?’ Later I even imitated this sticker! Then people will respond, ‘Oh my God, is this

you?”’

All in all, these participants were naturally drawn to stickers that they could relate to

for a variety of reasons. They were aware of these tendencies and more than happy to

integrate these stickers into their communication, with the hope of constructing a desirable

and fitting online image for themselves. We find that as mobile communication develops,

sticker use is coming increasingly into focus, both for nonverbal communication and for

identity management.

5.2.5 Emoji/Stickers Cultivate Subcultures

Subculture, as defined by Dick Hebdige, is “a subversion to normalcy” (Hebdige, 1991).

We talk about emoji/sticker subcultures by discussing how our participants’ novel use of

emoji/stickers cultivated smaller groups of users that shared distinct beliefs towards emoji

or stickers, when compared against the larger user population. We present two examples

below.

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The “Mysterious Smile”

All emoji/stickers onWeChat has a label. People generally become familiar with underlying

meanings of them by looking at their graphical representations and names before sending

them out, particularly for new and unfamiliar stickers. It is therefore not surprising that

our participants used emoji/stickers as the names suggested, such as using a crying face to

illustrate sadness. Nevertheless, this is not always the case. Younger participants from the

city or small town appropriated emoji by assigning unconventional meanings to them. The

first emoji on WeChat, the ordinary smiley ,, was originally designed and understood tobe a genuine smile (Blagdon, 2013). However, our young participants (P5, P25, and P30)

rejected this convention and insisted that it was a mysterious smile that covered all kinds of

connotations, such as sarcasm or speechlessness, even though they knew that it was mostly

used to indicate an ordinary smile. P5 told us he sent this smiley when he did not really

have anything to say or when he did not know how to reply — but surely it was not meant

to be a genuine smile. Similarly, P24 saw this smiley as “a fake smile.” We found that this

alternative interpretation was widely known and accepted among younger participants but

not among older users. Older participants, such as P20 and P21, shared that they used this

smiley when they wanted to smile or show friendliness. The “mysterious smile” interpreta

tion for this particular smiley was likely determined by age, since participants like P5 and

P30 told us that they would not send it to their older family members since “they won’t un

derstand.” For P8, P24, and P25, even though they used the smiley as a “mysterious smile”

in their family groups, they did not bother to explain this connotation and did not care if

their families understood.

“Sticker Competition”

A special practice that has evolved in the case of sticker use is the sticker competition,

when users exchange stickers for the sake of exchanging them, for showing off the stickers

they have, or for collectively putting together a story using stickers only. Three of our

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participants, P8, P19, and P25, whose ages ranged from 18 to 27, mentioned that they

occasionally engaged in sticker competitions. P19, who was a graduate student, described

how she and her roommate used to compete with stickers in 2015:

We had a WeChat group for the four of us in our dorm. So sometimes we

would chat if there was nothing urgent to do for our labs. Since we all had other

groups, we saved stickers from here and there, so we would communicate in

our group. In general, it was between the two of us, me and a roommate. The

other two girls just watched. Basically, when we two received any interesting

stickers, we sent them in the group and then started showing off. We would

show off when we were terribly bored — ’Hey I saved so many new stickers

today’ and send tons of them. Then she would say, ’Hey this is interesting. I

have received these ones,’ then she would send tons of other stickers. It was

like that. Back and forth we both saved many, many stickers. We sent stickers

for the sake of sending them. (P19)

Instead of sending stickers for nothing in particular, P25 competed with stickers with

his friend and they crafted stories without using any text: “We only sent stickers, yes, but

stickers could form some stories. For example, I sent this ‘eating shit’ sticker, she would

reply with shit covering the face [sic]. This is actually very funny.” We proceeded by asking

him if they were showing off, and he answered,

Not really showing off. It was just a particular type of humor. Sometimes you

don’t want to talk and when you send stickers, you feel entertained. This is

especially the case when I can connect the stickers together, creatively, connect

them as a story — it becomes really fun. (P25)

During sticker competitions, the phone screen fills with all kinds of stickers but zero

text. Because all these three participants were recalling past experiences when referring

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to sticker competitions, we were unable to investigate this practice realtime. According

to their descriptions, however, we could see the potential for mobile communication to

involve mainly stickers, without explicit need for text. We note, however, that such sticker

competitions need users to be relatively familiar with the stickers he or she has. Of course,

users must also be fans of stickers for this level of use.

5.2.6 Democratize Stickers

Stickers, unlike emoji, have greater flexibility. WeChat supports users in creating cus

tomized stickers elsewhere and uploading to WeChat for communication and exchange.

Therefore, the content and design of these customized stickers is under the creator’s con

trol, not WeChat’s1. A few participants took advantage of this flexibility and democratized

stickers in one form or other.

Create One’s Own Stickers

Twomale participants (P24 and P25) were so enthusiastic about using stickers that they cre

ated their own stickers. P24, who liked to build things, made a customized sticker to create

an animation of his work, so he could share it with others onWeChat more easily. He used a

mobile application for image editing calledMeitu Xiuxiu (美图秀秀) to shoot a short video

and transmit it as a gif. After that, he imported the gif as a customized sticker to WeChat, a

process he described as “convenient.” P25, somewhat differently from P24, made multiple

stickers based on the ordinary smiley that we discussed above as the “mysterious smile.”

In fact, P25’s idea of creating his own stickers came from the alternative interpretation of

“mysterious smile.” He explained,

This emoji is very magical, this ‘mysterious smile.’ All the ones I created were

based on it. There are plenty of resources online, so I just downloaded the first1At the time of this study, this was true — later on, WeChat started to censor customized stickers as well;

not all customized stickers can be sent or viewed on WeChat.

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emoji and used it as a foundation and then worked on it in Meitu Xiuxiu. (P25)

He told us how he did not expect people to use his stickers but found that they were soon

being circulated by his friends. Together, these examples demonstrate howwhen users have

been actively engaged in using stickers, they turn to creatively making their own and find

ways to replace textual representations with their own creations.

Erotic Stickers

During an interview, we would request or be given a chance to take a look at the stickers

participants used and saved. When scanning their lists of customized stickers, we occa

sionally found them saving erotic stickers that presented pornographic visual elements in

one way or another. For instance, some of them included graphic representations of penis,

while others were snippets of adult videos. P5, P25, and P26 were the only participants

that were willing to openly discuss erotic stickers with us. While P5 initially hesitated to

show his customized erotic stickers, he eventually opened up and handed us his phone. P25

claimed he did not save any erotic stickers, while P26 said he saved them just for keeping

them — not for circulating them, the same as P24. There was a visible gender divide here,

since no female participants saved erotic stickers. P1, who had recently retired as a teacher,

told us how annoying it was when her male peers sent erotic stickers in WeChat groups:

“Only those naughty guys send them.”

Because the dissemination of pornographic content is not allowed in China, either online

or offline, it can only exist in the form of customized stickers that are made, uploaded,

and disseminated by individual users. To the best of our knowledge, these customized

stickers were not monitored by Tencent and are thus freely circulated on WeChat, allowing

enthusiastic users the freedom to create and share stickers of their choice. P12 mentioned

that there were groups in which people would exchange erotic stickers without using a

single word — “Why bother, since no text is needed?” The use of customized stickers for

pornographic communication is apt since they offer versatile pictorial representations.

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An Instructional Sticker

One rural participant, a young woman (P15), was happy to talk to us and told us she owned

two smartphones. While one was charging, she showed us the other one. She mentioned

that she was not very into stickers but often used emoji: “I’m a mother and I don’t have

time to play around with those stickers.” She also described how she conducted her small

business via WeChat. We noticed that the last customized sticker on her list looked more

like a screenshot than a regular sticker. When we asked what it was, she clicked on it to

show us that it was in fact an instructional sticker for teaching people how to change an

iPhone setting: “Some iPhone users don’t know how to add the platform (an application

her business used), so we will send it to them, as it illustrates the procedure for chang

ing the setting pretty clearly.” We present an example here with this instructional sticker,

demonstrating that these graphical representations embedded in online communication can

effectively convey information without relying excessively on text.


Findings above highlighted the widespread adoption of emoji and stickers on WeChat and

how the use of these nontextual elements in mobile communication also signals the less

ening dependence on text. This rapid and multifaceted proliferation of emoji/stickers in

mobile communication carries important implications, as discussed below.

5.3.1 Emoji/Stickers Can Support Text Communication

As finding show, emoji are frequently used to display nonverbal clues and supplement text.

Participants mentioned how emoji helped them to better express their emotions and sup

ported the text in their messages for more accurate and effective communication. Scholars

including Derks et al. (Derks et al., 2008), Lo (Lo, 2008), and Dresner and Herring (Dresner

& Herring, 2010) have argued for giving importance to nonverbal cues in online commu

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nication. Given this prior work and our findings, we believe that emoji/stickers might be

leveraged to compensate for the lack of nonverbal cues in textbased exchanges and/or to

simply convey meaning more effectively.

5.3.2 Emoji/Stickers Can Complement Text When Text Is Incomplete

Participants discussed how emoji/stickers could complement text to convey behaviors, ac

tions, and attitudes (e.g., for modulating tone). In these cases, a complete intended meaning

is only conveyed when pictorial elements are included. We saw several instances of this.

For example, P19 shared that she added emoji to ensure that her texts were correctly un

derstood by her audience. Also, since the Chinese language is often complex and nuanced,

the presence of emoji/stickers can compensate for the subtlety of messages, particularly on

a textbased communication medium. Several languages other than Chinese, such as Indic

languages, tend to require considerable effort from the user for the input of text. Aging

users might also find it challenging to enter text on small phone screens. In these scenarios,

emoji/stickers could be leveraged for a smoother user experience.

5.3.3 Creative Use of Emoji/Stickers Without Text

Participants took great pleasure in using emoji/stickers for personalizing their communica

tion or for cultural exchanges in ways that would not have been possible with text. The

sticker competitions highlighted an extreme scenario of how these exchanges could take

place entirely without the use of text. The most active exchange of “red packets” that we

witnessed also attests to high levels of engagement during acts of cultural production. Par

ticipants also derived happiness from generating and/or appropriating pictorial representa

tions that allowed them to develop their own identities in ways that they valued.

There are realworld scenarios where communication may need to convey silence and

individuals may wish to convey silent consent or silent dissent to avoid uncomfortable sit

uations. Young adults might be expected or feel pressure to listen to elders without stating

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their opinions. This might also be true for work scenarios where junior employees need to

show deference to higher authorities. In such cases, emoji/stickers may be actively lever

aged to add nuance to communication and fill in for the absence of appropriate words.


This study highlights several prevalent, nontextual dimensions to mobile communication

and how usergenerated and/or culturally relevant emoji and stickers could bring additional,

desirable meaning to communication that is primarily textbased. In addition, regarding

user’s interaction with WeChat, this study presents numerous examples of user’s interac

tions of functions on WeChat that conform to WeChat’s design intention (similar to the

study in Chapter 4): for example, when emoji/stickers are used for supporting text, such

as using emoji/stickers to represent emotions or expressions. However, some other uses

of emoji/stickers are, in fact, appropriations (Dix, 2007) of emoji/stickers. One instance is

P15, who sent a customized sticker to instruct her customers ways of changing an iPhone

setting. Although customized stickers can be animated gifs, they are mostly used for con

veying feelings other than instructions. This example of appropriation of stickers shows

that appropriating a function is different from using a function as it is designed or intended

to be used, because users have to understand a function well enough to appropriate it. As a

form of user interaction, appropriation thus goes further than simply using a function as it

is designed to be used.

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CHAPTER 6

YOUNG PEOPLE’S SOCIAL COMMERCE PRACTICES

When conducting the first study (R. Zhou, Wen, et al., 2017), I had the chance to meet and

talk with young Chinese students who were studying abroad. While I did expect them to

use WeChat to contact their friends and families in China, I unexpectedly found that some

used WeChat to sell goods to people in China. Soon, I learned that journalists had reported

similar stories of Chinese students, who were studying in foreign countries, bought products

from the country they studied in, and then resold these products to customers in China via

WeChat and other online technologies (The Economist, 2017; Williams & Xu, 2017). I

was instantly interested in learning why these young Chinese used WeChat to sell goods to

China, since WeChat was not designed for commercial but social activities.

6.1 Background

Social commerce is defined as “Activities by which people shop or intentionally explore op

portunities by participating and/or engaging in a collaborative online environment” (Curty

& Zhang, 2011). While the beginning of social commerce was marked by the integration

of social functions to online shopping websites (Swamynathan et al., 2008), recent years,

people have also started buying and selling on online social networks, such as Instagram

(Gibreel et al., 2015) and Facebook (Jack et al., 2017; Moser et al., 2017). Young Chinese

people’s buying and selling practice on WeChat is an example of social commerce.

Regarding young people’s technology use, scholars have been researching the motiva

tions and practices of young people using technology for quite some time. A few tech

nologies attracted the most attention: the internet (e.g., (Gross, 2004)), mobile phones

(e.g., (Woelfer et al., 2011)), online social networks (e.g., (Woelfer & Hendry, 2012)), and

games (e.g., (Adachi & Willoughby, 2013; Anderson & Jiang, 2018)). Scholars found that

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teenagers used the internet to assuage loneliness and build friendship (Gross, 2004; Gross

et al., 2002; Kinnula et al., 2012); they also used online social networks to construct social

ties (Requies et al., 2016), explore identities (Dyer, 2017; Woelfer & Hendry, 2012), and

engage in politics (J. Chen, 2017; Penney, 2018). Ito et al.’s seminal study dug deep into the

motivations behind young people’s engagements with technology (Itō et al., 2010). They

found young Americans’ were motivated to use new technologies mainly for two reasons:

friendship and interest (Itō et al., 2010).

While a lot has been researched about young people’s technology use, these past studies

paid less attention to young people’s social commerce experiences (this was also partially

due to the novelty of this phenomenon). Similarly, Ito et al.’s study discussed little about

young people’s technology uses that are not motivated by friendship or interest (but other

scholars have touched upon this, for example (DiSalvo & Bruckman, 2011). Having talked

with young Chinese who used WeChat for social commerce, I was eager to learn more

about this practice since it could extend both on research about social commerce and young

people’s technology use. I asked, how do young Chinese people use WeChat, a social

platform, for buying and selling? What motivate them to engage in this social commerce

practice?


As my goal was to deeply understand how and why Chinese young people buy and sell on

WeChat, qualitative methods were appropriate. While I set out to find Chinese students

who resell foreign products in China, I met, in my preliminary investigation, both these

students and other young people living in China who bought and sold on WeChat more

often. To recruit these young people, I decided to look in larger, more developed urban

regions where people were usually more open to various opportunities and have more free

dom to engage with novel technologies compared with their rural counterparts. I selected

Beijing and Shenzhen, two of the most prosperous cities in China for conducting this study.

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No. Gender Age Locationa Role(s)P1 F 17 SZ BuyerP2 F 14 SZ Buyer, sales agentP3 M 17 SZ BuyerP4 M 17 SZ BuyerP5 F 16 SZ BuyerP6 M 15 SZ Buyer, sales agentP7 M 14 SZ Independent sellerP8 M 19 SZ Buyer, sales agentP9 F 22 BJ Buyer, independent sellerP10 F 16 BJ Buyer, sales agentP11 F 17 BJ Buyer, sales agentP12 F 17 BJ Sales agentP13 M 21 BJ Buyer, independent sellerP14 M 21 BJ Buyer, sales agent, independent sellerP15 M 18 BJ Buyer, sales agent

a SZ is Shenzhen and BJ is Beijing.

I chose to target the age group between 12 to 22, covering middleschool, highschool, and

college students. Chinese young people in this age range usually own a mobile phone and

are becoming more aware of their own identity and independence as adolescents, albeit

still struggling to acquire real economic independence. Different from older generations in

China, these young people are also both marketeconomy native and digital native.

I started recruiting in Shenzhen in 2017. We looked for participants through posting

advertisements on our Moments and directly contacting people we knew who might meet

these criteria. Once I found several participants to begin with, I reached out to more po

tential participants through purposive and snowball samplings (Goodman, 1961; Seidman,

2006). Later in 2018, we1 went to Beijing and repeated the same recruitment process un

til reaching data saturation (Charmaz, 2006b). In total, we recruited 15 participants (see

Table 6.1) and interviewed them oneonone.

In the interviews, we asked about what, how, and why they bought or sold on WeChat.1I collaborated with researcher Susan Faulkner from Intel when interviewing young people in Beijing.

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Interviews were semistructured, and each took 50 to 90 minutes with most lasting for an

hour. Interviews were conducted in coffee shops, at interviewees’ homes, or through phone

calls. We provided 200 Chinese yuan ($30) for each participant as compensation. With par

ticipants’ permission, we audio recorded interviews and took notes and phone screenshots.

Interviews were conducted in Mandarin, the official language in China.

For data analysis, all interview recordings were transcribed and translated into English.

Using the English versions of the transcripts, we followed an open coding process (Char

maz, 2006a). We first started from linebyline coding to establish an initial codebook.

Then, we discussed questions we had regarding the codes. With codes generated from

the initial linebyline coding and the subsequent discussion, we constructed a preliminary

codebook. Using this preliminary codebook, we then coded additional interviews, adding

new codes to the codebook, met to discuss the codes and resolve any doubts until all the

transcripts were coded. After this open coding process, we continued with axial coding

(Charmaz, 2006a). We grouped similar codes together to form categories and grouped sim

ilar categories to form themes. In the end, we arrived at four themes: buyers, sellers, ad

vantages, and disadvantages of WeChat.

6.3 Findings

Buying and selling on WeChat involve several roles played by participants and specific

choices participants made. In this section, I detail a typical transaction process on WeChat,

what participants bought and sold, and their reasons for buying and selling on WeChat.

6.3.1 A Typical Transaction Process on WeChat

Based on participants’ accounts, they bought and sold on WeChat with a typical transaction

process2. If a buyer wants to buy a product, they will look for potential sellers by asking for

recommendations from existing WeChat contacts. Recommendations are sent to the buyer2For a more detailed explanation of this process, please refer to Chapter 7 section 7.3.2

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in the form of sellers’ unique WeChat identification QR codes, acting as business cards.

Upon receiving a seller’s QR code, the buyer can scan it in WeChat and add the seller.

Oftentimes, sellers’ QR codes can also be found on their Moments or other websites where

sellers posted them. After adding the seller, the buyer can look through their inventory in

their Moments.

If a buyer has questions for a seller, they can chat with the seller in a oneonone conver

sation. When the buyer wants to purchase a product, they let the seller know and the seller

will ask for additional information for the product, such as size or color. After the seller tells

the buyer the total order price, the buyer can pay by transferring money or sending WeChat

Red Packets to the seller. The seller then asks for the buyer’s shipping information, ships

the order, and sends the order’s tracking number to the buyer. The shopping experience is

completed when the buyer receives the order.

6.3.2 Buyers

Buyers (买家) make purchases by transferring money or sending WeChat Red Packets in

WeChat’s instant messenger. Most participants were buyers except P7 and P12, who had

concerns about buying on WeChat (we will explain in section 6.3.5). Among other partici

pants, buying ranged from once a week (e.g., P1) to one transaction at the time of this study

(e.g., P5). Participants who were buyers purchased a variety of products. Beauty products

such as cosmetics were popular among female participants, whereas clothes and shoes were

bought by both males and females. Other less commonly purchased products include con

tact lenses, slimming products, cigarettes, etc. Some products were expensive, costing over

a thousand yuan (e.g. $1030, P15’s Nike sneakers). Other cheaper, more mundane products

ranged from 20 yuan ($3, P4’s meal) to 60 yuan ($8.8, P10’s lipstick).

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6.3.3 Sellers

On WeChat, sellers (卖家) advertise their business on Moments, sell goods in instant mes

senger, and receive payments via money transference or Red Packets. P2, P6, P7, P8, P9,

P12, P14, and P15 were all selling on WeChat when we interviewed them. Some of them

have been selling for more than a year (e.g., P13) or even several years (P14); others have

just started selling a fewweeks ago (e.g., P6). P10, P11, and P13 previously sold onWeChat

but stopped at the time of this study. We named these 11 participants asWeChat sellers (微

商), which includes two more specific types of seller: sales agents and independent sellers.

Sales agents (代理) are sellers who get their inventory from a boss (老板). Bosses are

also sellers; but instead of selling on their own, they recruit sales agents and direct them

to sell. Since sales agents do not worry about stocking inventory, they focus on growing

their customer base. When a sales agent is more confident of their business skills, they

can recruit other sales agents and thus become a boss. Therefore, profits are passed along

a pyramid organization of bosses and sales agents, resembling the characteristics of multi

level marketing (Barkacs, 1997). In this study, eight out of 11 sellers were sales agents (P2,

P6, P8, P10, P11, P12, P14, P15). While most sales agents ship the products they sell, in

some cases they rely on their boss to ship products for them (e.g., P8). Products sold by

sales agents cover a wide range, corresponded to the items that buyers purchased (see the

section above).

Independent sellers (个体微商) ran their WeChat business alone, without help from a

boss. In this study, P7, P9, P13, and P14 were independent sellers. A stark difference ob

served between sales agents and independent sellers is that the former usually sold physical

goods, while the latter more commonly sold services or virtual online goods. Among the

four independent sellers we talked to, three did not sell physical products. P7 earned money

on WeChat by writing homework for his middleschool peers. A college student (P9) ad

vertised her parttime makeup service on, and was paid through, WeChat. P13 sold virtual

items in an online computer game. P14 acted as both a sales agent and an independent seller.

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He sold physical products as a sales agent and sold services such as helping people to get

refunds from the AppStore, as an independent seller. It appears that for young people, an

external resource, such as a boss, was needed to sell physical products. In the absence of

this support, or by personal choice, independent sellers turn to services for possible source

of income, since services are more flexible in terms of product circulation and storage than

physical products. Selling services also largely depends on one’s own skills and abilities —

all the four independent sellers in this study sold services they were capable of providing.

We asked participants how much money they earned. Some could make a sizeable

profit, such as P6 who earned 1000 yuan ($147) and P15 who earned 2000 to 3000 yuan

($300 440) in an average month. Some earned little or lost money: P12 paid her boss 88

yuan ($13) to start her business selling pets, but she failed to sell any pets. She later decided

to sell colored contact lenses instead. Participants who sold on WeChat before but stopped

at the time of this study were those who earned little money (P10, P11, P13).

None of these young WeChat sellers were selling fulltime, and they did not support

themselves through selling on WeChat. While a few participants were adults in the legal

sense (i.e., over the age of 18), their daily living expenses were provided by their par

ents, in part because they were the only child in their families due to the OneChild Policy.

Therefore, selling on WeChat was only a parttime “job,” although many of them treated it

seriously.

6.3.4 Rationales for Buying and Selling on WeChat

Participants had numerous reasons to buy and sell on WeChat rather than on other shopping

platforms. They described WeChat as convenient, ubiquitous, and easy for leveraging so

cial relations, and made starting new businesses simple. For many, buying and selling on

WeChat also supported exploring future careers, earning money, and gaining independence.

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WeChat Is a Necessity

We were interested in learning why participants chose WeChat’s instant messenger, a com

munication feature, to buy or sell goods, since there were many other shopping platforms

such as Taobao, andWeChat also has its own shopping functionWeChat Store. Participants

explained the overarching importance of WeChat in their lives, and why using WeChat’s

messenger was the most convenient way to buy and sell goods and services.

As a popular mobile instant messenger in China, WeChat is important because most

Chinese people use it. We asked P9 if she had used other communication tools. She an

swered, “Yes, I downloaded other [communication] applications before just out of curios

ity, but later I uninstalled them all.... I figured WeChat has more people, so I’m mostly on

WeChat.”

Besides being used for casual, everyday chat, WeChat expands itself to formal commu

nication scenarios as well. P10, a highschool student, told us her teacher communicated

communicated in WeChat groups:

She will tell us what the homework is at school, but she will also send home

work instructions as pictures to the [WeChat] group, which has students and

their parents.... This way she doesn’t have to repeat the homework in class or

call or text everybody, which would be much more inconvenient than posting

it in the WeChat group.

Besides communication, WeChat is widely used as a payment tool. P4, P9, P10, P13,

P14, and P15 mentioned how they preferred WeChat for money transaction and used dif

ferent money transaction functions for different purposes. P1’s, P2’s, and P6’s parents sent

them pocket money via WeChat’s Red Packets. P1 said, “WeChat is convenient to pay. My

parents give me money by sending me WeChat Red Packets.” P13 also echoed the conve

nience of WeChat by saying “it’s convenient to just send Red Packets when buying things

on WeChat.” While WeChat can be used to pay orders online, it can also be used to pay

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orders offline with WeChat Wallet (Kow et al., 2017). As P9 said, “I no longer carry my

purse now and I don’t use cash anymore. I just pay with WeChat [Wallet].”

Indeed, WeChat is “sticky” (Y. Chen et al., 2018) in part because it combines communi

cation and payment functions in one application. This integration of diverse functionalities

is more crucial when the user has a limited budget to buy their ideal phone with plenty

storage space, which was the situation of many participants (e.g., P4 and P9). In general,

participants’ parents decided what phone to buy for their child, and they would not pay extra

for phones with more storage. P10 elaborated by explaining why she used WeChat to pay

for goods, but not Alipay (aka Zhifubao支付宝), a mobile application designed especially

for online money transactions, to pay:

For Alipay, I install it only when I have to use it, and I uninstall it when I don’t

need it. My [phone] space is limited, and I have to free it every now and then. I

don’t want to delete games, so I delete Alipay since WeChat can replace it.... I

think WeChat can both chat and pay, so it’s more convenient. It feels like more

trouble to open Alipay to pay. When I’m walking on the street and chatting [on

WeChat] and if I want to buy a bottled water in a store, I will just hand over my

phone with WeChat opened to the salesperson. It’s more convenient. I think

Alipay is just a payment tool. It’s not as good as WeChat. WeChat can do so

many things, and I just love to use stuff like WeChat

The word “convenient” was frequently used by participants to describe WeChat, which

it seems to express more about howWeChat is ubiquitous in their lives as they study and live

in China (Y. Chen et al., 2018; Lawrence, 2016). WeChat appears to be in every corner of

their lives, and it is only natural for them to use WeChat no matter where they go and what

they do. P4, when complaining about his limited phone storage, summarized WeChat’s

ubiquity elegantly: “I uninstalled Alipay because it’s too big. WeChat is not small either.

However, since WeChat is a necessity, it can’t be uninstalled.”

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WeChat Is Where Guanxi Thrives

As noted in the previous section, one of the major reasons that participants chose to use

WeChat, rather than other instant messengers, is that WeChat is where the people partici

pants care about, and want to talk to, are virtually hanging out and connecting. In China,

connections formed with people are called guanxi (关系). When translated directly, guanxi

means “relationship.” Yet, guanxi also carries more nuanced meanings when used in the

Chinese context, as it encompasses other culturally situated concepts such as power, hier

archy, commitment, reciprocity, trust, and more (Gold et al., 2002). Guanxi partly com

municates the concept of social capital (N. Lin, 2001), and it is extremely critical to culti

vate, manage, and sustain good guanxi with people. Initially, guanxi described connections

among people in the real world. But as the internet develops and as people start communi

cating online, guanxi has come to refer to online human connections as well. In this study,

WeChat is where participants kept in touch with and managed their guanxi. They leveraged

their guanxi to buy or sell on WeChat and their guanxi was also affected by their buying

and selling practices on WeChat.

Participants’ guanxi on WeChat first includes people they know from real life and have

added to their WeChat network. These people, such as family members, can heavily influ

ence participants’ buying and selling. Seven participants told us they saw sellers advertising

products on their Moments, who were their relatives (P4), classmates (P3, P5, P6, P7, P11,

P13), and friends (P8, P15).

The main goal for some purchases on WeChat was to maintain guanxi. For instance,

P13 bought beef jerky from his friend on WeChat to help his friend’s business. Besides

buying, participants’ existing guanxi on WeChat could motivate them to become a WeChat

seller. P8 told us he became his friend’s sales agent after seeing his friend selling clothes

on Moments, and P15 followed his friends into sneaker sales since they all loved sneakers.

Apart from guanxi on WeChat, participants’ buying practices were affected by their

guanxi as reflected on other websites or social networks outside of WeChat. For example,

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by following makeup artists on Bilibili, a videosharing website, P10 found new WeChat

sellers: “I saw some makeup artists wearing colored contact lenses on Bilibili. They wear

the lenses and post the WeChat accounts where they bought the lenses. People who want to

buy can search for these accounts or just scan their QR codes on WeChat. This is one way I

addWeChat sellers.” Guanxi on other popular social networks also helped participants look

for opportunities to do business and expand business onWeChat. Examples include P2, who

was introduced to her boss on QQ (an instant messenger owned by the same company as

WeChat), and P9, who advertised herself as amakeup artist onWeibo (amicroblogging site).

P9 explained how she established connections with future customers, by taking advantage

of her existing guanxi on Weibo:

Basically, I do makeup for customers and then some photographers will take

photos for customers; this is how I collaborate with photographers. When I post

advertisement of doing makeup on Weibo, I will at (i.e., @) everybody who

worked on the photo, including the photographer, so that potential customers

will find me [through the photographer’s Weibo posts] and add my WeChat.

We noticed that even though this guanxi was outside of WeChat, they connected buyers

and sellers to start their transaction process within WeChat. This guanxi, together with the

aforementioned existing guanxi on WeChat, forms a robust guanxi network that underpins

participants’ buying and selling practices on WeChat. As teenagers or young adults, partic

ipants were able to reach people that would otherwise be inaccessible without this online

network, helping the guanxi converge and thrive on WeChat. Such a convergence is due to

the unshakeable role played by WeChat in Chinese people’s everyday life as a necessity.

WeChat Makes Starting Business Simple

BecauseWeChat is not only a social platform but also a money transaction tool, participants

found it easier to buy and sell goods on WeChat. When looking at WeChat from the sellers’

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standpoint, it is the best application for starting their business. Both P8 and P12 mentioned

WeChat’s low barrier to entry, compared with other specialized shopping platforms such as

Taobao. P12, a highschool student who sold colored contact lenses, explained whyWeChat

is the best for selling:

The reason that I have this idea [of selling goods] is because there are many

WeChat sellers on WeChat, so I’d also like to take a try. If [selling] on Taobao,

you need to first create a store by paying 2,000 yuan ($300). Second, for selling

medical supply (e.g., contact lenses) on Taobao, you need to have a business

license or some safety certificate. Taobao is more formal; not everybody can

do business on Taobao. WeChat is more casual. As long as I guarantee my

customers that the stuff I sell is not dangerous or harmful, then I can sell them.

If only Taobao existed, then I would not have started selling stuff. Taobao has

much higher barrier to entry.

Running a new online business could be a daunting task for a beginner. However, for

participants who were sales agents, they met few challenges that would make it difficult

for them to start a new business. P2, P6, P10, and P12 were all sales agents whose boss

determines what and how they would sell. P2 said, “I sell cosmetics and skincare prod

ucts because my boss asks me to sell them. He also has rules of when and how to post

ads on Moments.” P12 echoed that her boss would even give her a template for posting

advertisements. Sales agent P8 had more freedom. He could decide what to sell, even

though he could only choose from his boss’s inventory. Generally, sales agents followed

the instructions of their boss to save time and effort while focusing on interacting with

potential customers. Although most sales agents we talked to sold physical products, P10

sold fortunetelling service onWeChat. When she made a sale, she passed along the written

fortune from her boss:

My classmate told me doing fortunetelling could earn money, so I decided to

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try. There was a guy who was a professional fortune teller. He sent us choices,

and then we forwarded them to customers. For example, if you want to know

about your career, I will let him know you want to check “career.” Then he

will give you numbers from 1 to 28. You pick one of them, say if you pick 22,

and I’ll send 22 to him. He starts working on it. After he is done, the result

will pass from him to me, and from me to you.

Participants told us that reaching potential customers and advertising one’s business are

also simpler on WeChat, due to WeChat being a social platform. P8 compared Taobao with

WeChat to explain why WeChat is more effective to grow a customer base: “It’s okay to do

business on Taobao, but there are more restrictions for Taobao stores. Also, it’s much more

effective to advertise [one’s business] on Moments.”

Besides WeChat’s internal social network Moments, messaging groups on WeChat can

be an effective channel for advertising one’s business. P14, a senior in college, shared his

experience of earning money by doing homework for peers:

Each university has its own [WeChat] groups. There are many big groups with

500 people for social stuff, such as some communication groups for students

in the same cohort. Words will pass along in these groups among people. Say

maybe the group owner is my good friend, then I’ll post an advertisement in

the group and people will add me on WeChat.

Based on participants’ accounts, it was relatively simple to start a business on WeChat.

It is also a natural place for youth to leverage their existing guanxi through advertising

across their current contacts. As summarized by P12, “Selling on WeChat is more casual

and better for ordinary people. There’s no particular threshold. As long as you want to

work on this and you have your supply channels, you can start selling and advertise on your

Moments.”

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Young People Use Technology to Gain Independence

In this study, many participants were driven by their interests to start buying or selling on

WeChat, including P1, P3, P6, P11, P14, and P15. For instance, P3 was a passionate movie

fan. He shared the reason that motivated him buying on WeChat:

The first time I bought [on WeChat] was to buy movies. It was for Port of Call

(踏雪寻梅). At that time, the movie was no longer available in cinemas, so I

had to look for other sources.... I found a guy, a WeChat seller who specialized

in selling these [movie] resources. Then I bought it from him because I couldn’t

find it elsewhere. I told you that I really love watching movies. If there’s

a movie that I seriously want to watch, I’m going to find it and watch it no

matter how.

Similarly, P6, P14, and P15 began selling on WeChat due to their interests. P6 loved

headsets, hence he sold headsets; P14 was an intense smoker, thus he sold cigarettes; and

P15 was a fan of sneakers himself, so he sold sneakers.

P2, a middleschool girl, was also driven by her interest in cosplay to become a sales

agent. Yet, for her, there was another crucial reason for selling on WeChat: “I’m in a super

moneyconsuming subculture: cosplay. One costume costs a lot of money.” Although P2’s

WeChat business was driven by interest, because her parents did not financially support her

interest, she had to turn to other moneymaking opportunities such as selling on WeChat.

Likewise, P14, both as a sales agent and an individual seller, echoed P2 in how his lack of

money prevented him from playing games:

Basically, my motivation is my living expenses [from my parents] are not

enough. Most of my money is spent on my girlfriend, and then on games. I’m

super into games, just like girls are into buying lipsticks or cosmetics. Pretty

much the same idea. It’s a kind of psychological comparison when us under

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grads play games together, like “I play better than you and I add more money

[to the game] than you.” People compete with each other.

In P10’s case, she was solely motivated by a desire to make money. She only had 800

yuan ($120) from her parents in a month and hoped to earn extra money to buy colored

contact lenses and slimming products.

Participants had other motivations to sell on WeChat such as practicing their skills (P9

as a makeup artist) and helping their parents so that they wouldn’t be too stressed by their

economic situation (P12). One participant was explicitlymotivated by lack of independence

and freedom: P7 was a middleschool boy who told us that his parents intentionally broke

his iPhone when they believed he wasn’t paying enough attention to his studies. P7 wasn’t

happy; he made up his mind to earn money on his own:

I didn’t ask for money from my parents after they broke my iPhone, except for

meals. It was kind of like a cold war. They gave me one of their old phones so

they could still contact me, but I bought myself a new phone two or three weeks

later. First, I didn’t spend money randomly but tried to save them. Second, I

earned money from my classmates by delivering food or doing homework for

them. If it was for homework, they would send Red Packets to my WeChat;

for food, they paid cash.

P7 was pleased with the money he earned selling services to his peers through WeChat

and felt that he gained independence from his parents. In fact, most participants who were

WeChat sellers were happy that earning money gave themmore freedom and independence.

P2 said, “My parents will ask me how much I earn this month. They will joke and say, ’buy

us breakfast.’ The money I earned on my own is completely under my control. I feel very

accomplished (laughter).” P6 also echoed that he felt “absolutely awesome” to earn money

on his own, and that he “just can’t stop,” even though his parents told him that he should

focus on studying.

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Some participants felt selling on WeChat helped them explore future career options.

P11 said she would start her WeChat business again when she was in college: “Because I

think college students will have more needs for things such as colored contact lenses. If I

sell this stuff when I’m in college, I will be able to sell more.” In contrast, P13 would no

longer sell on WeChat in the future because “it earns too little. Better to have a formal job.”

Some buyers were also exploring and putting forward their identity through their con

sumer networks onWeChat. For instance, P10 was a middleschool girl who enjoyed taking

selfies and wanted to appear prettier in those photos. She bought cosmetics, colored con

tact lenses, and even slimming products on WeChat. The research she did about products

introduced her to new networks, which in turn shaped her aesthetic and selfperception.

These experiences of participants’ highlight that how Chinese young people are mo

tivated to engage with online commerce by individual, nuanced reasons that are often a

blend of economic needs, a desire for independence, their personal interests, and influence

coming from friends.

6.3.5 Social Commerce on WeChat Is Risky

While it seems like WeChat is capable of supporting participants from a variety of aspects,

it has disadvantages for buying and selling as well. For example, for buyers, it was difficult

to return products bought on WeChat. P1 explained,

It’s so much trouble. Full of trouble. I remember one time I bought a formal

dress on WeChat. It didn’t fit. Basically, to return it, you need to mail it back

with 20 yuan ($3) shipping fee. Then it ships a new one to you, which will cost

another 20 yuan. You need to pay both fees on your own, because returning on

WeChat is not like on Taobao, where you can rely on logistics companies.

Because of the lack of thirdparty supervision for buying and selling onWeChat, buyers

also found themselves vulnerable to fraudsters. Both P11 and P13 had unpleasant experi

ences with fraud when they bought on WeChat. P11 shared her story: “I bought a dress

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when I was in the second year of middle school. It was sold by a friend I knew from the

internet. I transferred 60 yuan ($9) to him. Then he asked for my shipping address, phone

number, and name. A week later when I asked him for the tracking number, I found that he

deleted me on WeChat.” P13 echoed that he had met fraudsters on WeChat as well and he

had lost more than 1500 yuan ($220).

With these risks in mind, it is understandable that two participants, P7 and P12, had

never bought anything from any WeChat sellers. P12 said, “Cosmetics sold on WeChat are

either copycats or fakes. Isn’t it irresponsible to sell those things that people will use on

their faces? It’s more reliable to buy these things on certified online stores or in brickand

mortar stores. I don’t buy them on WeChat.” P7 also agreed that products sold on WeChat

had quality issues: “I don’t buy on WeChat because of quality concerns. I don’t think it’s

a matter of whether I trust the seller, because it is a fact that product quality is an issue on

WeChat.”

Sellers also losemoney onWeChat. When P13was a seller, he encountered a case where

he sold a virtual item in a computer game to his customer but never got paid. Similarly, P15

had been cheated by his supplier:

I have been cheated several times. The person was abroad, and he just didn’t

ship the order. It included two pairs of sneakers around 3000 to 4000 yuan

($440—$590). I only had his phone number and several mutual friends we

both knew. He got my money, then deleted me and all our common friends on

WeChat.

For teenage participants, it could be difficult to maintain their businesses on WeChat

because they could not attract enough customers. For example, P10 only sold her fortune

telling service for a matter of days and stopped. Earning money on WeChat is also difficult

because the products sellers sell may not have a high demand in their guanxi networks,

which was the case for P11 and P12. P11 told us her customers were mostly her friends in

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the same high school. Since few of them used makeup, they did not have the need to buy

cosmetics from P11. P12 also explained why her first attempt at selling didn’t work out:

Pets are really hard to sell. Who has money to buy pets for people around my

age? Almost nobody. For buying a cat or a dog, the cheapest price will be

2000 ($300). For a kid, it is very hard for him to pay for such a price. From the

perspective of parents, I think they will prefer cheaper pets but not purebreds....

I think parents also trust pet stores more. They don’t have much confidence or

trust in WeChat sellers.

From these cases, we can see that a limited guanxi network (e.g., peers near the same

age) can pose uncertainty to young people’s businesses on WeChat. At the same time,

parents still have inputs as to what their children can do and buy.

Although WeChat’s ubiquity as an allencompassing mobile application makes partic

ipants’ lives more convenient, it is not always an advantage to have an instant messenger,

a social network, and a payment tool altogether on one single platform. When a seller

advertises on the social network, it might hurt their guanxi. P14 elaborated on this:

I wasn’t aware at the beginning, but later I found that every time after I posted

some ads on Moments, I also lost many friends on WeChat. They might not

delete you, but since people don’t like you selling on WeChat, they will block

your Moments so they won’t see you, as I advertise too much.

In addition, since serving customers is fulfilled by chatting with them on WeChat’s in

stant messenger, some sellers (P6 and P8) could be burdened by heavy and random demands

from customers. P6 said, “There are people who are ’kouhai’ (口嗨), meaning that they just

keep talking but never buy, like ohI’mjustasking that kind of people.”

As we presented the numerous ways WeChat supports or hinders participants’ experi

ences, it is clear that the qualities of WeChat being convenient, ubiquitous, easy, and risky

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are not mutually exclusive —WeChat has all these properties all at once. While buying or

selling on WeChat seems accessible and simple to begin with, it brings other longerterm

consequences, such as losing money or hurting one’s guanxi.


The findings above illustrate how a popular communication technology can be utilized by

youths to explore and fulfill diverse needs. I organized insights learned from these findings

into three perspectives: the perspective of Chinese social context, the perspective of the

technological intentions of WeChat, and the perspective of young people. In the end, I also

talk about how participants’ interactions with WeChat differs from those in the previous

two studies.

6.4.1 Chinese Social Context Shapes Young People and WeChat

This study situates in the context of China. Participants are young people who were in

their teens or early twenties, living in Chinese metropoles. These young Chinese are all the

only child in their nuclear families and are thus heavily influenced by their parents’ high

expectations for them to focus on their studies and performing well in school. Still, many

of these young Chinese were passionate about exploring new opportunities and lifestyles

around them: they chatted with strangers online and became sales agents; they took self

ies and applied photo filters to appear pretty on social networks; and they were willing to

spend thousands of yuan on goods from Western luxury brands to make themselves stand

out. These new experiences generated by China’s market economy and participation in

globalization could not have been imagined by older generations in China. Buying and

selling on WeChat is one example of how young people in China embrace the larger world

and seek different lives than previous generations.

WeChat is the most widely used mobile social platform in China, the allencompassing

application that is a “necessity” (P4) to be installed on one’s phone if one is in China. Par

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ticipants’ experiences showed that as so many Chinese people use WeChat, the traditional,

offline guanxi network now also migrate online to WeChat, essentially making WeChat a

virtual Chinese society. Some scholars discuss WeChat as distinctively Chinese from other

angles such as the business strategy of Tencent (i.e., the company that owns WeChat) and

its close relationship with the Chinese government (Y. Chen et al., 2018; Plantin & de Seta,

2019). We agree with them, based on findings of this study, that both WeChat as an allin

one mobile platform and its irreplaceable role played in Chinese people’s lives is unlikely

to be replicated in other cultural contexts. WeChat’s development and growth required a

robust technology industry, a tightknit relationship between the technology company and

the government, and a populace that is comfortable with socializing on a platform that is

allencompassing, thus able to access and share their data.

The peculiarity of WeChat offers a great opportunity to reflect on the reasons behind

young Chinese people’s social commerce practice on WeChat. Societal changes happening

in contemporary China are shaping both the technology, which is WeChat, and the people,

who are young Chinese people. Hence, the social commerce practice of young people in

China again reminds us of the importance of taking the larger context into consideration

when designing technologies for people (Lindtner et al., 2012): The context of technology

use always profoundly influences users, technology, and how they interact with each other

(Bijker, 1997; Winner, 1986).

6.4.2 WeChat Attracts Young People with Social and Payment Functions

Scholars have researched social commerce practices on different social platforms, such

as Instagram (Gibreel et al., 2015), WhatsApp (Kariuki & Ofusori, 2017), and Facebook

(Evans et al., 2018; Jack et al., 2017; Moser et al., 2017). WeChat differs from these plat

forms because it is a social network, an instant messenger, and a mobile payment tool.

WeChat has payment features to support users’ online and offline money transactions, such

as WeChat Wallet, money transfer, and Red Packet (Kow et al., 2017; Plantin & de Seta,

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2019; Wu & Ma, 2017). It also has a specialized shopping function WeChat Store. How

ever, the young people in this study did not use WeChat Store but instead utilized WeChat’s

instant messenger and payment functions for buying and selling, becauseWeChat as a social

platform with payment functions is more attractive than WeChat Store. This is supported

by comments from several participants noting how convenient WeChat is as a payment

tool, and their comparisons between WeChat and Alipay, praising the affordance of chat

ting with friends and paying transactions in one application. Participants also spoke highly

of WeChat because it was effective to advertise on its social network Moments.

Why is it crucial to integrate payment functions and a social platform? One of the critical

concerns of social networks is to gather as many loyal users as possible. To attract more

users means to address diverse user situations, including the qualities of the hardware users

have access to. While users with higher income levels who live in developed regions can

access and afford expensive phones with large storage space and fast processing speed, there

are also users who can only afford less expensive Android smartphones with limited battery,

space, and processing power. Young people in this study fall into this second category. They

did not buy their phones themselves: their parents bought phones for them, hence they

oftentimes used phones that did not fit their needs to save countless selfies or installing

numerous games, “forcing” them to uninstall other applications while retaining WeChat

(e.g., P4). If users must make a choice between applications to install and delete, it is safer

for a social application to integrate payment functions so that users will be less likely to

delete it.

What’s more, when payment functions are offered on a social platform, buying and

selling on this platform also become performative — users can see if their WeChat contacts

have reached out to a WeChat seller on Moments, if they have both added the same seller.

For example, when P13 bought beef jerky from his friend to support his friend’s business,

P13 and his friend’s mutual WeChat contacts would see their interactions on Moments,

making their interactions a performance or a presentation (Goffman, 1959). This is also

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due to WeChat’s nature as a social platform with a large amount of users.

For a thriving social commerce, we see the importance of integrating different func

tions, such as instant messaging, social networking, and money transaction, onto one single

platform, making the social commerce user experience more effective. Such a move can

also make the platform “stickier” (Y. Chen et al., 2018), “grabbing” more users and user

attention.

6.4.3 Young People Leverage Technology to Address Diverse Motivations

Past studies discussed young people’s technology use as motivated by friendship or inter

est (Itō et al., 2010). This study confirms their findings as some participants’ commerce

practices on WeChat were driven by their interest or friendship. But apart from interest or

friendship, this study also shows other motivations for buying or selling on WeChat. P2,

the cosplay lover, and P10, once a fortune teller’s sales agent, both began to sell on WeChat

because of their lack of money to purchase items outside their parent’s oversight. While

one could argue that these are also interestdriven motivations, without their parents’ sup

port, both P2 and P10 lacked critical resources —money— to pursue their interests. Other

motivations are more complex than interest or friendship, such as P9 (seller) who sought

to practice her makeup application skills and P12 (seller) who hoped to lessen her parents’

economic stress. In one case, P7, whose phone was purposefully broken by his parents, was

directly driven by a lack of autonomy to earn money from his peers and eventually bought

a new phone for himself.

Besides financial motivations, the study identified that buying and selling on WeChat

can provide young people with a deeper knowledge about themselves and the world, lead

ing them to independence and maturity. Similar to findings from DiSalvo and Bruckman

(DiSalvo & Bruckman, 2011), earning money was crucial beyond the face value; it offered

young people an important method for acquiring emotional gain. For example, P2 told us

her parents respected her more when she started earning her own money.

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Selling on WeChat also gave young people experiences that helped them explore what

future career possibilities. P11, after trying to sell onWeChat, determined she wanted to sell

onWeChat again after starting college, while P13 did not want to continue to sell onWeChat

because it was not a “real” job for him. Sometimes, what these young people learned was

unpleasant: Both P11 and P15 were cheated and lost money. These learning experiences

afforded them an opportunity to progress along the road toward independence. In these

ways, WeChat provided commercial experiences that were rarely available for previous

generations in China and allowed younger people to experiment, with relatively low risk,

in an online market economy.

Thus, for these young Chinese people, engaging with commerce practices on WeChat

is a means to address diverse motivations and goals, including a desire for more indepen

dence. When designing new technologies for youth, we should consider motivations that

are “serious work” (Kinnula et al., 2012) and understand that some difficult life lessons

young people will face are in these technology environments.


Compared with the previous two studies in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5, this study presents

an example of user’s appropriation of WeChat: while both the instant messenger and the

social network on WeChat are designed for communication and socialization, users appro

priate these functions and use them instead for buying and selling (with the help of money

transaction features such as Red Packets) — user’s goal is not simple communication, but

extend to use communication features for commercial activities. WeChat provides commu

nication features but does not envision users to use these features for buying and selling,

which also explains whyWeChat has more flexibility and fewer regulations for commercial

activities when comparing with other professional shopping platforms. The next chapter

delves deeper into this phenomenon of social commerce on WeChat by focusing on adults,

who have more economic independence than teenagers or college students and thus differ

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ent goals of engaging in social commerce. Adults’ social commerce practices are also an

example of appropriating WeChat, although with distinct outcomes.

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CHAPTER 7

THE TWIN ROLE OFWECHAT IN SOCIAL COMMERCE

In the last chapter, I reported a study I did on Chinese young people’s social commerce

practices, focusing on young people’s motivations of using WeChat for buying and selling.

When conducting that study, I became more interested in learning how people engage in

social commerce on WeChat in general, instead of solely looking at teenagers and young

adults. I learned that compared with youths, there were more adults engage in social com

merce on WeChat. Many of their social commerce practices were different from youths,

for example, they bought goods from foreign countries and resold them in China, resem

bling characteristics of a grey market (see section 7.5 for more discussion on grey market).

At the same time, I was still interested in WeChat: as an allinone mobile platform, how

does WeChat influence social commerce among adults, who are not only more mature than

young people but also more economically independent? I thus conducted a study that aimed

at understanding the role played byWeChat in social commerce by focusing on adult buyers

and sellers.

7.1 Background: Social Commerce and Guanxi in China

Social commerce is defined as “activities by which people shop or intentionally explore op

portunities by participating and/or engaging in a collaborative online environment” (Curty

& Zhang, 2011). It can take place on ecommerce sites with social functions or on social

networking sites (SNSs) that have been appropriated to support commerce. Early research

on social commerce saw it as a combination of ecommerce sites and social functions. Later,

scholars challenged this view and argued that “social commerce is an interdisciplinary sub

ject that simultaneously concerns business, technology, people, and information” (L. Zhou

et al., 2013). Thus, social commerce is about people who participate in it, information

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circulates in it, business and management it operates on, and technology that mediates it.

A key cultural concept that characterizes commerce in China is Chinese people’s in

terpersonal dynamics and relationships: guanxi (关系). Guanxi refers to the interpersonal

social relationship between two individuals. It “defines the rudimentary dynamic in person

alized social networks of power and it has a focus on tacit mutual commitments, reciprocity,

and trust” (“Guanxi”, 2020). One either has a guanxi with someone or one does not (i.e.,

when one does not know the person). Although guanxi seems to be highly similar to social

relationship, it differs fundamentally because the key to maintain one’s guanxi with oth

ers is to perform reciprocal favors (Ostrowski & Penner, 2009). When one says they have

many guanxi, it means one knows a lot of people from whom one could cash in favors.

Apart from quantity, guanxi is also about quality: a spectrum that spans from positive to

negative guanxi. Guanxi network (关系网) contains all the interpersonal social relation

ships a person builds with others. It is critical to cultivate and sustain good guanxi with a

large network of interrelated people in the Chinese society, since guanxi “lies at the heart of

China’s social order, its economic structure, and its changing institutional landscape” (Gold

et al., 2002).

It is thus not difficult to see the crucial role played by guanxi in commercial activi

ties in China. Past literature found that for a business to flourish in China, sellers need

to establish good guanxi with buyers by performing reciprocal favors and building trust

(Gold et al., 2002; D. Y. Lee et al., 2005; Martinsons, 2008). On Chinese SNSs, this good

guanxi between buyers and sellers can be cultivated with the support from people whom

buyers connect with (Bai et al., 2015; J. Chen & Shen, 2015; H. Liu et al., 2016). Ou et al.

characterized the fastformed guanxi built between a buyer and a seller during their online

interactions as swift guanxi, which “consist of mutual understanding, reciprocal favors, and

relationship harmony” (Ou et al., 2014). They argued social technologies could help build

swift guanxi and support social commerce (Ou et al., 2014).

Therefore, as a technology that contains both instant messenger and social network,

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WeChat could be an appropriate medium for social commerce. While past studies acknowl

edged the positive impact of WeChat on social commerce as a social networking tool (Q. Li

et al., 2018; J. Lin et al., 2018; Zheng et al., 2017), it is unclear what role WeChat might

play as an allencompassing application. For example, how do people use of WeChat, as a

powerful allinone platform, impact their guanxi and social commerce? I will investigate

the role of WeChat in social commerce by attending to the usages of various functions on

WeChat and taking WeChat as an allencompassing mobile platform.


In 2018, we1 went to China and interviewed 26 participants. To recruit participants, we

posted advertisements on our Moments, asking to interview the following individuals: (1)

people who are daigous (代购) — professional surrogate shoppers who travel to regions

outside of mainland China to purchase products and then come back to China to resell these

products on WeChat; and (2) people who use WeChat’s messenger to buy from daigous.

We started recruitment with daigous because in recent years, journalists reported that many

daigous used WeChat for resale (Eddie, 2016). We also asked people we knew to spread

the word and requested our initial participants to recommend other potential participants for

us, utilizing purposive and snowball sampling schemes (Goodman, 1961; Seidman, 2006).

In the initial set of interviews, participants told us that many sellers on WeChat were not

daigous, but people who sold items from the inventory of small multilevel marketing or

ganizations2 or their own handmade items. We thus recruited these types of sellers as well.

Recruitment concluded when reaching data saturation (Charmaz, 2006b), which resulted in

26 interviews in total: 14 in Beijing and 12 in Shenzhen, with 23 females and three males.

This gender skew reflects the gender distribution of sellers on WeChat (iResearch, 2017).1I collaborated with researcher Susan Faulkner from Intel when interviewing participants in Beijing.2Multilevel marketing, or pyramid selling, is “a marketing strategy for the sale of products where ...

earnings of the participants are derived from a pyramidshaped system. (“Multilevel marketing”, 2020)”Examples of company that utilized multilevel marketing include Avon and Amway.

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Table 7.1 offers detailed participant information.

Interviewswere semistructured (Seidman, 2006). We asked participants questions such

as “Why do you buy or sell on WeChat?” “How do you use WeChat to buy or sell?” and

“What do you think about WeChat for buying or selling? Interviews lasted between 60 to

90 minutes, with an average time of 80 minutes. We conducted interviews in participants’

homes or public spaces such as coffee shops or restaurants, providing each participant with

350 Chinese yuan ($50) as compensation. With participants’ permission, we audio recorded

interviews and took pictures of their phone screens. All the interviews were conducted in

Mandarin.

After data collection, I transcribed all the interviews into Chinese. We then identified

what parts of the interviews that needed to be translated (e.g., participants’ use of WeChat

for buying and selling) and what could be documented but omitted from wordforword

translation (e.g., the number of contacts they had on WeChat). I translated all relevant parts

of the transcripts from Chinese to English. With all the English transcripts, we analyzed

interview data iteratively using thematic analysis (Miles & Huberman, 1994). We read a

few transcripts separately and identified preliminary themes from them. Then we discussed

these themes and came to an agreement on a final set of themes. Using these themes, we

read through all the transcripts, highlighted data where themes showed up, and discussed

with each other regularly to make sure their understanding was coherent. In the end, we

grouped similar themes together to form higherlevel themes.

7.3 Findings

7.3.1 Buyers and Sellers

All 26 participants were buyers on WeChat and 19 of them also sold goods on WeChat.

Buying on WeChat is consistent across participants, meaning one purchases products in

WeChat’s instant messenger. Selling on WeChat is different from buying in that it involves

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No. Gender Age Locationα Employment Statusβ Role(s)P1 F 25 BJ Fulltime employee BuyerP2 F 23 BJ Fulltime employee BuyerP3 F 30 BJ Fulltime employee Buyer, daigouP4 F 30 BJ Fulltime employee Buyer, daigouP5 F 27 BJ Fulltime sellerγ Buyer, sales agent, bossP6 F 26 BJ Fulltime employee BuyerP7 F 32 BJ Fulltime employee Buyer, sales agentP8 M 25 BJ Parttime employee Buyer, sales agentP9 F 22 BJ Graduate student Buyer, sales agentP10 F 30 BJ Fulltime employee BuyerP11 M 25 BJ Fulltime employee Buyer, sales agentP12 M 27 BJ Fulltime employee Buyer, sales agentP13 F 27 BJ Fulltime employee Buyer, daigou, sales agent, bossP14 F 29 BJ Fulltime employee Buyer, daigouP15 F 35 SZ Stayathome mom Buyer, sales agent, bossP16 F 28 SZ Fulltime employee Buyer, independent sellerP17 F 34 SZ Stayathome mom Buyer, sales agentP18 F 28 SZ Fulltime employee BuyerP19 F 35 SZ Parttime employee Buyer, daigouP20 F 33 SZ Stayathome mom Buyer, daigouP21 F 32 SZ Fulltime seller Buyer, daigouP22 F 35 SZ Fulltime seller Buyer, independent sellerP23 F 26 SZ Graduate student Buyer, daigouP24 F 23 SZ Fulltime employee BuyerP25 F 26 SZ Fulltime employee BuyerP26 F 24 SZ Fulltime employee Buyer, daigou, sales agent

α SZ is Shenzhen, and BJ is Beijing.β Participants’ formal employment status outside of buying or selling on WeChat.γ Fulltime sellers sell on WeChat as their fulltime jobs.

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diverse strategies. Based on these strategies, we identified four types of sellers3 (see Ta

ble 7.1): daigou, sales agent (代理), boss (老板), and independent seller (个体卖家).

Daigous ’take advantage of their geographical locations’ (P20) to buy products from

outside of mainland China and then carry them back to resell to customers in China. We

talked to nine daigous, who sold products acquired in Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong,

and the United States. They traveled as frequent as once per week to once every three

months. Some started their daigou business in the past six months; others had been daigous

for over five years. Daigous sold beauty products, healthcare products, luxury goods, and

baby products. Their monthly net revenue spanned from 3,000 yuan ($450) to 30,000 yuan

($4,500).

Sales agents are part of a multilevel marketing organization (“Multilevel marketing”,

2020). Different from daigous, they sell products obtained from a boss or a supplier, and

these products are acquired through WeChat as well. After receiving the products, they

resell these products to customers on WeChat. This means sales agents can save more time

for growing customer base and improving customer service than daigous since sales agents

do not travel. Of the 10 sales agents we interviewed, some of them had been sales agents

for three months, while others had been selling for over three years and had become bosses,

recruiting sales agents to expand business. Products sold by sales agents included clothes,

shoes, highquality counterfeit luxury products, homemade food, travel arrangements (e.g.

flight tickets), and daily necessities such as pesticides. Sales agents’ monthly earnings

varied from less than 3,000 yuan ($450) to more than 30,000 yuan ($4,500).

Finally, there were independent sellers P16 and P22, who bought materials and then

hand made products to sell, such as leather notebooks or birthday cakes. Both of them had

been selling on WeChat for three years, and they earned 5,000 yuan ($750) to over 10,000

yuan ($1500) in a month.3Two of these four types (sales agent and independent seller) are the same as identified in Chapter 6 section

6.3.3.

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Figure 7.1: Access QR Code Scanner. Figure 7.2: Pay Seller with Red Packets.

7.3.2 An Overview of Social Commerce on WeChat

Participants’ social commerce activities utilize WeChat’s instant messenger, its social net

work Moments, payment functions (i.e. money transfer and Red Packet), and QR code

scanner (see Figure 7.1). In a typical social commerce interaction, buyers first need to

add sellers on WeChat by receiving and scanning sellers’ unique identification QR code

on WeChat. Oftentimes, sellers advertise themselves by posting their WeChat QR codes in

WeChat’s instant messenger, onMoments, and elsewhere outside ofWeChat. If seen within

WeChat, these codes can be shared by sellers’ existing WeChat contacts to other buyers; if

seen outside of WeChat, buyers can scan the codes inWeChat to add sellers. Once the seller

is added, the buyer can look through the seller’s advertisements in their Moments. If the

buyer is interested in a product, they can chat with the seller in instant messenger. When the

buyer decides to purchase, they pay by transferring money or sending Red Packets to the

seller in their chat (see Figure 7.2). Upon receiving the money, the seller prepares the order

and ships it, sending the buyer an order tracking number via instant messenger. The whole

process completes when the buyer receives the order. This entire buying and selling process

can be, and often is, completed solely on WeChat, using different functions on WeChat.

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We found social commerce on WeChat deeply intertwines with guanxi in three ways:

• First, social commerce begins from guanxi. Existing guanxi of buyers and sellers on

WeChat, such as friends and family, provide connections between buyers and sellers

who did not previously know each other.

• Second, once buyers and sellers are connected on WeChat, sellers need to cultivate

longterm guanxi with buyers and strengthen it, so theirWeChat business can develop

further. To cultivate good guanxi, sellers use a variety of ways to demonstrate they

are reliable and their products are highquality. Buyers also have other means of

checking product quality.

• Third, social commerce activities may negatively affect buyers’ and sellers’ existing

guanxi onWeChat if, for instance, sellers post too many advertisements onMoments.

By risking guanxi, social commerce on WeChat also risks itself.

As both the medium and the mediator of social commerce, WeChat influences the rela

tionship between social commerce and guanxi. The following sections will detail multiple

aspects of the relationship between social commerce and guanxi, and how WeChat affects

this relationship.

7.3.3 Buyers and Sellers Establish Connections through Existing Guanxi on WeChat

Previous literature found that support from existing social relationships on social media help

facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers (Bai et al., 2015; Bao & Volkovynska,

2016; J. Chen & Shen, 2015; Liang et al., 2011; Lu et al., 2016; Shin, 2013). On WeChat,

existing guanxi supports buyers and sellers to establish connection, a crucial prerequisite for

transaction. All participants expressed how their existing guanxi on WeChat helped them

connect with buyers or sellers, and thus engaged with social commerce.

Sellers told us it is more effective to start from selling to people in their guanxi networks.

All the sellers we interviewed started selling onWeChat to people they knew, such as friends

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and colleagues, who are part of sellers’ realworld guanxi network. For sellers, people who

they have already built guanxi with are trustworthy, and because of this guanxi, these people

often feel responsible or even obliged to support sellers’ businesses. While ecommerce

websites have features to prove sellers’ reliability (e.g. seller’s rating), WeChat lacks these

features. As P19 pointed out,

Because the selling process on WeChat is fulfilled on Moments and there is no

thirdparty assistance, trust is super important in this process. Thus, in general,

sellers start from selling in their guanxi network, such as among friends. This

way the cost of building trust is reduced.

For buyers, existing guanxi on WeChat is crucial because it is a reliable guarantee of

product quality, and buyers cared about product quality seriously. For instance, P17 used

to buy diapers from JD.com, one of the biggest Chinese online shopping platforms that

claims to only sell highquality products. Yet the diapers she bought from JD.com “felt

entirely different” from the ones she bought in Hong Kong, even though these diapers were

produced by the same brand — the ones bought on JD.com felt rougher.

Because buyers worried about getting lowquality products, many of them turn to their

reliable guanxi onWeChat. P2 preferred to buy from daigous onWeChat because she knew

them in person — they were people in her guanxi network from real life. P25 was similar;

she only bought from sellers on WeChat who were introduced by somebody she trusted in

her guanxi network. P7, a mother of a toddler, went even further that she did not trust any

daigous but her cousin who lived in New Zealand to buy baby formula for her: “For quality

sensitive products like baby formula, I won’t buy from daigous. It’s not safe. I don’t mean

that daigous are selling fake products, but maybe their source of purchase is unreliable, and

they don’t even know.”

Indeed, buying from sellers who are part of one’s guanxi network (P6, P7, P10, P18,

P24, P25) or who are recommended by people in one’s guanxi network (P1, P2, P6, P10,

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P24, P25), is the most important reason for buyers to buy on WeChat with confidence. P6

explained,

I usually buy from daigous I know or daigous recommended by people I know

on WeChat. For those I know, they were my classmates or colleagues. Some

of them went abroad for higher education and some stayed abroad after they

graduated. Some colleagues immigrated to countries such as the US. For those

recommended, I only buy from the ones who were recommended by people I

truly trust, such as highschool peers or colleagues with really good guanxi.

While ecommercewebsites also have social functions for building connections,WeChat

outperforms them because it starts off as a social platform, which encourages close and di

rect communication among users. Later, when WeChat attracted more and more users,

users’ offline guanxi networks migrate to WeChat, and WeChat then became the space

where offline, trustworthy guanxi presented online (Y. Chen et al., 2018; Plantin & de

Seta, 2019). With these guanxi from offline acting as conduits, it is easier for buyers and

sellers to build connections and trust — both are crucial for a successful social commerce

experience.

7.3.4 Sellers Cultivate and StrengthenGuanxiwith Buyers throughDemonstrating Product

Quality with Technology

Overall, what participants cared themost whenmaking purchase was product quality, which

they often used the term “authenticity” to refer to both the authenticity of the brand and the

product’s high quality. For example, P24 and P25 did not mind waiting for several weeks

for daigous to bring back products from abroad, so long as the products were truly bought

from abroad with highquality. P3, a daigou who purchased her inventory from Japan, gave

us a clear list of priorities of buyers’ concerns: “Customers buy from us out of three major

reasons. Number one is product authenticity; this absolutely comes the first. Number two

is speed. Number three is price.”

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(a) Location on Top Left Shows P14 Was inJapan

(b) The Title of This Post Says “Paying for chocolateand cakes at the airport”

Figure 7.3: P14’s (daigou) Moments Posts Showed She Was Buying at an Airport in Japan.

Therefore, the ability to demonstrate product quality is pivotal for sellers to cultivate

their newly established connection with buyers into longterm guanxi and further strengthen

this guanxi, which will then help sellers maintain existing customers and grow reputation.

Participants who were sellers utilized multiple strategies to demonstrate product quality,

oftentimes involving technology.

First, daigous (P3, P13, P14) actively posted photos and videos when they were buying

abroad, taking advantage of the locationtagging feature on Moments. They knew their

customers would like to see they did buy products from other countries. P3 said, “I will

post photos with my locations on Moments when I’m in Japan. Isn’t it that WeChat only

allows you to tag your photo with a location unless you are really at there?” Figure 7.3

shows P14’s Moments posts, showing she was buying at an airport in Japan.

Second, for those sellers (P15, P22) who hand made and sold food, they used their

phones to document product ingredients with extensive written descriptions and photos.

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P22, a mother who sold homemade birthday cakes, made sure she addressed her customers’

concerns about ingredients in cakes through photo documentation:

There are several common questions customers ask about our ingredients, such

as where we get them. For these questions, I shoot photos and add descriptions

for each of the ingredients. For example, the cream I used is from [brand]

and the flour is from [brand]. I buy eggs at [a wellknown local store]. Other

ingredients are bought at [a specialized store for baking materials]. I save these

photos and descriptions in my phone, so whenever customers have questions,

I can answer them immediately.

While sellers demonstrate product quality to cultivate and strengthen guanxi, buyers

also check product quality so they can tell if a seller is continuously reliable to buy from. A

common strategy buyers use for checking product quality is to scan the product’s QR code

on WeChat. As P1 explained,

The way I check [product quality] is primitive. I just use WeChat to scan the

QR code on the package of the product. When you scan it, you can find its

place of origin. If after scanning I still can’t find any meaningful information

of the product, which happened before, I will never buy it again.

Apart from scanning product QR codes, buyers also used specialized applications for

checking product quality. These specialized applications have experts who can judge if a

product is highquality; sometimes, the application itself can examine the product’s quality

too. P10, a buyer who liked purchasing luxury products, told us how to check if a pair of

expensive sneakers is authentic: “There are some websites and applications, such as Hupu

(虎扑) and Du (毒), in which you can upload photos and ask experts to determine [product

quality] for you.” Likewise, P6 used a mobile application calledMeili Xiuxing (美丽修行)

to check ingredients in beauty products and then compared these products’ effects to their

labelled ingredients to determine product quality.

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Besides using technology such as WeChat, participants also utilized other means for

checking or demonstrating product quality. For example, buyers determined product qual

ity based on previous experiences with the product (P6, P17) and used price as an indi

cation for product quality (P8, P10). Sellers were transparent with customers of potential

risks involved in purchasing (P5, P12, P19), and they educated customers to judge product

materials and quality (P16).

Through demonstrating product quality, sellers cultivate and strength their guanxi with

buyers, and buyers then recommend sellers to people they know. This is how sellers grow

customer base and earn reputation on WeChat. The process of strengthening guanxi with

buyers is direct and intimate because of WeChat’s instant messaging. As P4 said,

When I open the interface of WeChat, I feel much closer with customers. I

can message them, send videos to them, and start video chat or audio chat with

them. We can also share some other stuff. Say if I see something interesting

on other apps, I can send the link to them directly on WeChat, and we can then

chat about it.

7.3.5 Using WeChat for Social Commerce Can Hurt Guanxi

While past literature focused on the positive aspects of social commerce on WeChat (J.

Lin et al., 2018; Sun et al., 2016), there are negative aspects as well. One of the most

evident disadvantages of social commerce on WeChat results from sellers’ frequent adver

tisement on Moments. While advertisement helps customers learn about sellers, it also

annoys sellers’ WeChat contacts, who are people in sellers’ guanxi network, and thus hurts

the longestablished, precious guanxi between them.

As both buyers and sellers, P5, P16, and P23 expressed frustration of seeing too many

advertisements on their Moments. P23 said,

Some people on my WeChat were classmates from primary school or middle

school. We didn’t know each other very well before, but once I added them

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on WeChat, I feel much closer to their lives since I can see their Moments.

However, when some of them became WeChat sellers, it’s extremely obnox

ious because they kept posting advertisements screen after screen. I’m slow

on blocking people so sometimes I can see all these ads. They are way too

annoying.

Participants hid these advertisements on their Moments by blocking those who posted

them, and sellers were well aware that they were blocked. P21 said,

I have been blocked by many people. Some even post on Moments and say,

“while others are posting photos with families and friends during the Spring

Festival, there are some daigouswho are still flooding advertisements.” Daigous

are looked down upon.

P13 thought posting too many advertisements would risk her guanxi, so she tried to sell

in WeChat Store instead. However, few people showed up in her WeChat store, so she had

to return to Moments for advertising. P7’s solution was to create a group for more active

customers and only post advertisements in this group. P16 was conscious of how people

perceive her, so she restricted herself to post at most five advertisements in a day to avoid

annoying her WeChat contacts. “Too many ads make people feel you are thoughtless,” she

explained.

While social commerce helps sellers establish connection with buyers through existing

guanxi, it also complicates sellers’ guanxi with friends and families and even put such a

precious resource at risk. P3, P12, P15, P19, P20, and P21 all said they preferred not to sell

products to their friends or family. P3, a daigou, told us,

Family members who buy from me think I should not charge them money for

bringing products back for them. But it is impossible to not charge them, be

cause running daigou business is my job. It’s hard to balance this guanxi: if I

charge them, they get hurt; if I do not charge them, I don’t earn money.

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As mentioned before, the Chinese manage their guanxi with extreme caution (Gold et

al., 2002). Hence, it is understandable that sellers, such as P12 and P14, would rather lose

money than risk their guanxi. P12, a sales agent who made travel arrangements, shared his

experience with us:

I once booked a hotel room for my friends. But when their travel time ap

proached, the hotel told me the room was not available anymore. Since I was

afraid of damaging my guanxi with them as friends, I decided to spend my own

money to book another hotel for them, meaning I was paying out of my own

pocket.

P12 was wary of similar cases in the future, thus later he decided to only sell to strangers

but not to people he knew. He even registered a newWeChat account specifically for doing

WeChat business. He said, “It’s hard to deal with friends. For other customers [who are

strangers], I can just do business and talk about money.’

According to previous literature, buyers seem to be easily cheated by sellers (Bort, 2014;

Garg & Niliadeh, 2013; Oravec, 2014). But we found that sellers (P20 and P21) could be

cheated by buyers as well. One might think existing guanxi between buyers and sellers

would prevent this from happening, but it was exactly due to the presence of guanxi that

made sellers vulnerable. P21 said,

For old customers, I sometimes pay for their products in advance and they will

send money to me later. But in one case I never got my money back. She was

my college peer. She wanted an iPhone 6 when it was newly released several

years ago. To buy the phone, I asked somebody in Hong Kong to reserve an

order ticket for me so that I could buy it in that Apple store in Hong Kong,

because you had to have a Hong Kong ID to reserve a ticket for buying. The

phone was more than 4,000 yuan ($620). Whenever I asked her about this

money, she just avoided talking about it and promised she would pay me. I

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waited for a very long time because I thought she was my college friend. But

she never paid. Eventually I deleted her WeChat.

Therefore, even though social commerce onWeChat is based on guanxi that helps build

connections between buyers and sellers, it has limits too. BecauseWeChat is fundamentally

a social application, using it for commerce can damage people’s guanxi — a resource that

is often considered more important than money in China.


Findings above reveal how social commerce on WeChat mingles with guanxi, and how in

tertwining technical functions ofWeChat play both a positive and a negative role in affecting

the relationship between social commerce and guanxi.

Social commerce on WeChat is built from guanxi because buyers and sellers rely on

existing guanxi, on WeChat, to connect. Thus, this study confirms what previous literature

found: with access to a great number of social connections on social platforms, buyers and

sellers can establish initial connections more easily, which will encourage buyers to adopt

social commerce and sellers to run social commerce business (Z. Huang & Benyoucef,

2013; Lu et al., 2016; Stephen & Toubia, 2010).

While previous literature on social commerce on WeChat found that the “swift guanxi”

built between a buyer and a seller during their interactions for transaction is significant for

the success of social commerce (J. Lin et al., 2018), findings from this study instead show

that sellers, after establishing an initial connection with buyers, care more about cultivating

a longterm guanxi with buyers and strengthening this guanxi. This longterm guanxi is

achieved by sellers demonstrating the highquality of their products, leveraging technolo

gies both on and off WeChat, and through buyers confirming product quality with these

technologies. By offering reliable guanxi with easy accessibility, and by providing func

tions that sellers and buyers can use for building longterm guanxi, WeChat exerts positive

influence on social commerce.

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We also found that social commerce, because it runs on a social platform, may dam

age sellers’ precious guanxi. For example, sellers may create an imbalance on their social

network, with too many advertisements making them a nuisance rather than a valued con

nection. If selling to people in their guanxi network, a seller may also risk guanxi because

there is a tenuous line between moneymaking and reciprocity. While the former is impor

tant for the seller, the latter is how one establishes more and better guanxi, and guanxi is

crucial for social commerce. Thus, using WeChat for selling products may damage sellers’

guanxi and negatively influence social commerce.

If other social media technologies intend to adopt social commerce, what should they

do? They should first learn that the most important reason for social commerce to flourish

on WeChat is not because WeChat is a social platform— it is because WeChat is the social

platform that the Chinese choose by default and cannot live without (Y. Chen et al., 2018).

This means that Chinese people spend most of their time on WeChat rather than on any

other social platforms; and their online identities and networks are housed in the ecology of

WeChat. WeChat being the most popular social platform also means more guanxi are acces

sible on WeChat than on other social applications, and guanxi is the foundation for social

commerce. Because WeChat has a large enough guanxi pool for its users, social commerce

can thus flourish. Therefore, in theory, a social application can make social commerce hap

pen as long as it has functions to support direct communication, business promotion, and

money transaction. But in reality, the social application must be embedded in the lives of

its users to a degree that they will have social relationships that can be leveraged as resource

for social commerce.

Scholars found that when using social networks, people want to engage in social ac

tivities more than commercial activities (Ko, 2017). Our findings support this and suggest

that the ability to maintain a balance in relationships and commerce efforts is often compro

mised with social commerce. While social technologies can support social commerce by

attracting more users and providing necessary functions, should they really support social

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commerce, which will damage their social values? If social technologies want to support

social commerce, they should prioritize and balance the needs between those who want to

participate in social commerce and those who only want to socialize. Essentially, there

should be a transparency between social activities and commercial activities, supported by

functions that allow for flexible user engagement with social commerce. While we under

stand that social platforms will continue to seek ways to monetize their services, we believe

that social technologies should support social interactions first, to maintain their unique

offering, rather than becoming online shopping malls.


Similar with the previous study (Chapter 6) on young people’s social commerce practices on

WeChat, this study is also an example of user’s appropriation of WeChat. Participants used

various communication and social functions to buy and sell goods onWeChat (with the help

of money transaction features such as money transfer and Red Packets), even though these

functions are not meant to be used for commercial activities. Appropriation of WeChat

goes deeper than using WeChat as it is intended to be used because the user understands the

functions better and thus can appropriate them for his or her own purpose. Yet, appropria

tion also brings outcomes that the user may not expect. For example, as findings showed,

while sellers took advantage of the large number of social connections on WeChat for es

tablishing and expanding their businesses, their use of WeChat’s social network Moments

for advertising also hurt their valuable guanxi. This study presents both the advantages and

the potential risks of appropriating a technology, using social commerce on WeChat as an

example.

7.5 Impact on WeChat’s Social Commerce due to New Taxation Law

When interviewing participants for this study, one question I asked participants was whether

they reported tax for their income earned onWeChat. There was no exception— all of them

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responded no. Some participants thought reporting tax was unnecessary, since they were

not earning a huge amount of money, but “only a few thousand yuan” (less than $1,500).

Participants who earned more said nobody reported tax, and the government did not care

either. However, during the study, we also heard from several participants that the Chinese

government was in the process of formulating a new law to tax money earned from online

platforms such as WeChat and Taobao. The media soon reported this news too. From

talking with participants, I learned that one of the biggest attractions of selling on WeChat

was the absence of taxation. I wondered what it would mean if this advantage disappears.

7.5.1 Background: A Grey Market on WeChat and a New Taxation Law

A grey market refers to “the trade of a commodity through distribution channels that are not

authorized by the original manufacturer or trade mark proprietor” (“Grey market”, 2020),

and a black market is “the import of legally restricted or prohibited items …as is the smug

gling of goods into a target country to avoid import duties” (“Grey market”, 2020). Tra

ditionally, a grey market is formed around goods that have huge price differences in two

countries: people buy goods from a country and resell these goods in another country to

earn the price difference. According to the definitions of grey and black markets, most of

the social commerce businesses onWeChat should be classified into forms of black market.

For example, daigous carried goods from outside China and resold them in China without

paying import tax. However, the line between a grey market and a black market can be

blurred when coming to China. While social commerce businesses on WeChat are mostly

forms of black market, they are culturally accepted by Chinese people. As findings from

above shown, participants engaged in social commerce on WeChat without worrying too

much that what they were doing was essentially illegal, and they were not pressured by

the government or any law to perform legally either. Therefore, in the rest of this chapter,

I categorize social commerce businesses on WeChat as part of a grey market instead of a

black market, where the term “grey” highlights this subtly that selling on WeChat is neither

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entirely right (white) nor entirely wrong (black), but more a state in between.

According to past literature, there are a few significant differences between offline and

online grey markets (Zhao et al., 2016). First, barrier to entry of online grey markets is

lower than their offline counterparts. Second, online tools make it possible for individuals to

conduct grey marketing resale, when offline it is solely operable for wholesalers or smaller

scale retailers. Third, the customers of online and offline grey markets are also different.

Online grey marketers utilize consumertoconsumer (C2C) websites such as Taobao or

Ebay to directly resell products to end customers, instead of reselling to other retailers as

traditional offline grey marketers do.

Many studies on retail and global market have researched grey markets (Berman &

Dong, 2015; Bucklin, 1993; Zhao et al., 2016). While most of them focus on traditional,

offline international grey markets, in recent years, a few of them started looking at online

grey markets as well (Berman & Dong, 2015; Zhao et al., 2016). In HCI, grey market

has not been closely studied yet. But a related economic form — informal market — has

been investigated recently, mostly by researchers studying information and communica

tions technologies for development (Chandra, 2017; Chandra et al., 2017; Pal et al., 2018).

In informal market, people make profits by reselling goods that are unaware of the original

trademark holder. Thus, grey market is a type of information market. While many factors

influence a grey market, one of the most prominent one is the policy used to regular the

market, such as taxation. While scholars in economics have learned much about the rela

tionship between public policy and grey market (Bucklin, 1993; Cross et al., 1990), it is

still unclear, from an HCI perspective, that how technology plays a role in grey market with

some policies enacted.

According to earlier discussions in this chapter, social commerce onWeChat oftentimes

represents a grey market, especially when focusing on the businesses of daigous. And when

conducting the study in this chapter, I realized quickly that not everything about social

commerce on WeChat was always “right.” For instance, consider a daigou who purchases

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goods from foreign countries and carries them back to China to resell them as commodities

— she is able to succeed in this entire process if only she deceives the customs officials that

the goods are for her own use but not resale. Otherwise, she will be taxed by the customs

and not earn much money. But since there is no taxation and other related policies enacted

onWeChat, daigous could take advantage ofWeChat and develop their informal businesses.

Essentially, none of the daigous I interviewed paid any tax for their businesses.

However, in 2018, the Chinese government released a plan for rolling out a law: The

Electronic Commerce Law in People’s Republic of China (中华人民共和国电子商务

法) (Www.npc.gov.cn, 2018). And on January 1, 2019, the law became effective. It details

regulations and rules for running businesses and making purchases online, regarding both

business owners and consumers. It also includes specific requirements for taxation, stating

that “ecommerce operators should fulfill their tax obligations in accordance with the law”

(“电子商务经营者应当依法履行纳税义务”) (Www.npc.gov.cn, 2018). Having seen

participants sharing news and expressing their concerns about this law, I wanted to explore

how this new taxation law could impact buyers and sellers onWeChat and social commerce

on WeChat more generally. With a particular attention to technology, I also hoped to de

lineate the relationship among WeChat, this new taxation law, and people’s grey marketing

practices. I asked the following research questions:

• Will this new taxation law impact WeChat’s grey market, including its buyers and

sellers? If so, what are those impacts?

• How will this law influence or even change WeChat? (i.e., how will WeChat respond

to this law?)

7.5.2 An Unexpected Finding: The Grey Market on WeChat Was Not Impacted

To answer these questions, I planned to first observe participants who were sellers from

this study and the previous study (i.e., the study in Chapter 6 on young people’s social com

merce practices) and then schedule interviews with them to discuss their changes of selling

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behavior and reasons of these changes. I chose to start from these participants because I had

added all their WeChat and understood their selling practices before the new law enacted.

If no data saturation was reached after interviewing these participants, I would recruit more

WeChat sellers and study their selling practices before and after the law became effective.

The implicit assumption I made was that sellers’ businesses and their ways of usingWeChat

for selling were bound to change due to the new taxation law.

I began to observe sellers on my WeChat since mid 2019, half a year after the taxation

law became effective. I checked sellers’ Moments posts several times in a day, noting down

the frequency of them posting advertisements on Moments, the products they advertised, if

there was any change in their behaviors of advertising, and if so, what the changes were.

But not long after I started observing, I found that there was no evident change in any of the

sellers’ behaviors — they kept posting many advertisements on Moments as they used to

post, and this was true for both sellers who were and were not daigous. Furthermore, P12

from Chapter 6, who was a senior in high school when I interviewed her but had graduated

and was ready for college at the time of my observation, had even restarted selling contact

lenses and pets on WeChat. (She stopped selling on WeChat from late 2018 to early 2019

because she needed to prepare for the college entrance examination.)

These findings were unexpected. To find out if sellers’ businesses was truly unaffected

by the law, I talked with a few of them onWeChat via text messaging. They told me they did

not feel they were forced by the law to change. For daigous, the risk of being caught by the

custom and being found out evading tax existed, but this risk already existed before the law

enacted. While I anticipated participants’ selling practices to change because of the law,

findings above revealed this assumption was unreliable. Sellers thought the government

would enforce this new law, but since there was no visible enforcement of the law, selling

on WeChat remained as before.

Having been focused on people’s use of WeChat in China for the past few studies, I

learned that WeChat is not solely an instant messenger but a fully integrated part of Chinese

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people’s everyday life. The popularity of WeChat was partly due to the Chinese culture and

the support of physical infrastructure in China, which both could be absent elsewhere. For

instance, people can pay with WeChat in restaurants in China because these restaurants

accept WeChat Pay. But outside China, restaurants may not accept WeChat as a payment

method. Witnessing WeChat being pervasive in China and deeply embedded in Chinese

people’s life, I began to wonder if WeChat will still be this powerful outside of China and

what it means for people to use WeChat in places other than China.

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CHAPTER 8

WECHAT REPRESENTS CHINA IN THE UNITED STATES

For my last study onWeChat, I turned to WeChat users outside China. I asked, if WeChat is

becoming pervasive and omnipotent in China, how would the use of WeChat change when

Chinese people moved outside China? The answer to this question will show how people

will use WeChat in an environment that lacks the support it has in China, and thus in turn

helps us understand how the cultural, physical, and even political infrastructures of China

play a part in the ubiquity of WeChat. In relation to these larger interests, I explored how

people use WeChat outside China and the reasons behind their uses.

8.1 Background

How people act in a society and how they decide what to do are influenced by many fac

tors, such as other people’s behaviors, the social and political environment they are in, the

traditions in their communities, etc. American sociologist Ann Swidler believed culture

plays a central role in influencing human action. She defined culture as “symbolic vehicles

of meaning, including beliefs, ritual practices, art forms, and ceremonies, as well as infor

mal cultural practices such as language, gossip, stories, and rituals of daily life” (Swidler,

1986). She argued that culture influences people’s actions “by shaping a repertoire or ‘tool

kit’ of habits, skills, and styles from which people construct ‘strategies of action’ (Swidler,

1986).”

If culture is a tool kit that people turn to for how to act in life, then this is true for both the

offline world and the online world. However, in an online environment, besides the culture

of the offline world in which the online environment resides, the online environment also

has its own culture (Allison, 2018). Thus, different online environments have different

cultures. The offline culture surrounded an online platform and the culture formed on the

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platform together influence what online platform people use and how people act on it.

The idea that different online environments have different cultures corresponds to Mar

shall McLuhan’s argument “the medium is the message” (McLuhan, 1964). McLuhan be

lieved that while a medium carries information as its contents, the medium itself also con

veys meanings. He believed that the meanings embedded in the medium are more important

than the contents carried by the medium. McLuhan defined medium broadly. For exam

ple, electric light, written words, print, telegraph are all media according to him (McLuhan,

1964). Certainly, whether something is a medium or the content of a medium depends on

one’s perspective. As McLuhan stated, “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another

medium” (McLuhan, 1964).

When understanding “the medium is the message,” I regard an online platform as a

medium from three aspects. Take WeChat as an example. First, WeChat, as a mobile appli

cation, runs on binary digits and electricity, which then realize the diverse functionalities on

WeChat. The digits and the functionalities are the technical aspect of a medium. Second,

the contents present onWeChat are in forms of text, audio, images, etc.: they are the format

aspect of the medium. Third, there is a cultural aspect of the medium as well— the Chinese

use WeChat as a default communication and social medium, while few other ethnic groups

use WeChat as intensively as the Chinese. In Chapter 4, when studying the longdistance

communication between Chinese parents and children, I focused on the format aspect of

WeChat (i.e., the communication media on WeChat). In this chapter, I extend my focus to

all three aspects of WeChat as a medium. Specifically, I particularly attend to the cultural

aspect of WeChat, as I am interested in learning why people use WeChat outside China,

where WeChat has less cultural and infrastructural support.

WeChat was launched in China in 2011 and rebranded for international markets in 2012

(WeChat, 2011). While WeChat can be accessed in more than 100 countries, it is not pop

ular in most of these countries because WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are the dom

inant instant messenger and social media in these markets (Bucher, 2020). For the 1.16

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billion monthly active users WeChat has accumulated so far (Statista, 2020), most of them

are Chinese people who live in China. However, data also shows that WeChat is popular

among Chinese people no matter where they are, as “100 million Chinese citizens use the

app outside of the country’s borders” (Bucher, 2020). For instance, WeChat is one of the

top messengers used in the AsiaPacific Region, which includes many popular travel des

tinations of the Chinese (Bucher, 2020). Taking these different factors into consideration,

I chose to study how WeChat is used in the United States, where there are many Chinese

tourists, students, and immigrants. In addition, from the standpoint of personal experience,

I am confident that I have a good understanding of the cultural and social contexts in the

US since I have lived in the US for seven years. This understanding will support me in

interpreting user behavior and motivation of using WeChat in the US. To explore WeChat’s

use in the US, I ask the following research questions: (1) how and why do Chinese people

use WeChat in the United States? (I define Chinese people as both Chinese nationals and

immigrants.) (2) Are there any differences in terms of how Chinese people use WeChat in

the US versus in China? Answers to these questions will provide insights for understanding

whether WeChat is a necessity in the US like it is in China.


To answer these questions, I conducted a qualitative study in two regions in the US: the San

Francisco Bay Area (the Bay Area) in California and the Atlanta Metropolitan Area (At

lanta) in Georgia. I selected these regions because many Chinese immigrants and nationals

lived in these regions (EcheverriaEstrada & Batalova, 2020). In addition to this, there were

some differences between these two areas that were related to my research interest: the Bay

Area is a place where most of Chinese immigrants and nationals live in the US; it has one

of the densest Chinese population groups in the US (EcheverriaEstrada & Batalova, 2020).

Due to this density and also because California has been a major migration destination of

the Chinese since more than a hundred years ago (“History of Chinese Americans in San

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Francisco”, 2020), Chinese immigrants have brought many Chinese traditions with them,

settled these traditions down, and developed them further in California. In the Bay Area, it

is common to see Chinese restaurants and supermarkets. In places where there is an even

denser Chinese population, such as the Chinatown in San Francisco, one can often hear

restaurants waiters converse with customers in Mandarin Chinese or Cantonese1 instead of

English. Because there are many Chinese people living here, the Bay Area has developed a

better infrastructural support for the Chinese as well. For instance, WeChat Pay and Alipay

are often accepted as payment methods in restaurants or snack shops (see Figure 8.1 for an

example I captured), because business owners know their customers from China may want

to use these tools to pay. Compared with the Bay Area, Atlanta does not have as many as

Chinese immigrants or nationals, thus there is less infrastructural support for them. Hence,

although both are in the US, the Bay Area has both a greater density of Chinese and in

frastructure to support WeChat than Atlanta. Researching how Chinese immigrants and

nationals use WeChat in both regions will provide a holistic view of how WeChat is used

in different places outside China.

Recruitment of participants began in the Bay Area in November 2019. To recruit, I

posted advertisements in my WeChat groups, on my Moments, and on a Chinese online

social network named Douban (豆瓣), a popular platform used by many young Chinese

who live in the US. In these advertisements, I looked for WeChat users who was originally

from China but later moved to the US. Ideally, they should have used WeChat in China

before they moved to the US, since I was interested in the possible changes that took place

in their uses of WeChat after they left China. I also asked my friends on Moments and

people I connected with on Douban to share these advertisements in their social networks,

hoping to recruit more participants. In early 2020, I repeated this recruitment process in

Atlanta until reaching data saturation (Charmaz, 2006b). The entire recruitment process

resulted in 20 participants: 11 in the Bay Area and nine in Atlanta. Table 8.1 provides1Cantonese is one of the many dialects in China. It is mostly spoken in southern China and is one of the

official languages of Hong Kong.

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Figure 8.1: On a Table in a Tea Shop in Cupertino, an Advertisement Says “Open WeChator Alipay to Scan, Order, and Pay for the Food.”

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Nameα Gender Age Locationβ Occupation Years of Livingin the US

Years ofWeChat Use

Yun Zhou M 30 BA Graduate student 7 7Chilun Zhang M 18 BA Undergrad student 0.25 5Lu Yang F 33 BA Researcher 10 7Ling Huang F 28 BA Data analyst 2.5 8Gan Jin F 26 BA Data analyst 8 8Xiaojun Lin F 22 BA Engineer 5 8Jiaxin Liu F 28 BA Designer 6 6Xia Chen F 28 BA Engineer 5 8Hui Tian F 24 BA Graduate student 2 6Ren Yu F 25 BA Engineer 6 7Min Jiang Nonbinary 28 BA Teacher 4.5 5Qianyu Wang M 23 ATL Graduate student 1.5 8Liumeng Wu F 24 ATL Graduate student 1.5 6Sheng Zhu M 29 ATL Graduate student 1.5 6Si Lei F 24 ATL Graduate student 1.5 6Ying Li F 22 ATL Graduate student 1.5 4.5Xiaolin Sun M 24 ATL Graduate student 1.5 9Anran Lu M 26 ATL Graduate student 2.5 9Yue Xu M 24 ATL Graduate student 1.5 8.5Fei Wang F 23 ATL Graduate student 1.5 4.5

α All the names are pseudonyms. β BA is the Bay Area and ATL is Atlanta.

participant information in detail.

Each participant first completed a fourday diary and then a facetoface followup in

terview. The diary asked participants to report how they used WeChat in their daily lives

with five short questions, including both multiple choice questions and openended ques

tions (see Appendix). Designed to be easy to answer in a short period of time, the diary

took no longer than five minutes to finish. The first four questions were mandatory, asking

participants the time they used WeChat, the device they used WeChat on, functions they

used on WeChat, and purpose of using WeChat. The last question asked participants to up

load a screenshot of their WeChat to show examples of what they did on WeChat. I made

the last question optional for participants who might have privacy concerns. Answers to the

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questions and the final screenshot were used in conjunction with the interview, to encour

age participants to reflect on their everyday use of WeChat and to provide addition data of

their uses as well.

Participants were instructed to select two weekdays and two weekend days of one week

to complete the diary. This criterion meant to be a low burden activity to capture how par

ticipants usedWeChat in their daily lives, acknowledging that participants’ schedules likely

differed between weekdays and weekends. In the morning of these four days, participant

received a link that directed them to a secure web page to complete their diary. They could

complete the diary at the end of a day, reporting multiple cases of using WeChat throughout

the day as one single diary; or, they could complete the diary multiple times in a day by

using the same link, recording their uses as soon as completed. Among all 20 participants,

seven completed their diaries once per day and 13 completed multiple times per day.

After participants finished their diaries, I scheduled an hourlong followup interview

with each of them to further understand their ways of using WeChat and the reasons and

motivations behind, with their diaries acting as a discussion guide. Focusing on their uses

of WeChat, I asked participants questions such as “How do you achieve this goal through

WeChat?” “Why do you use WeChat for this purpose?” and “Do you use WeChat this way

when you were in China, and why?” Interviews were conducted at coffee shops or partici

pants’ homes based on participants’ preferences. Interviews were also audiorecorded with

participants’ permission. To compensation for their time, each participant was given a $25

Amazon gift card.

After data collection, I transcribed all the interview recordings and used the Chinese

transcripts to conduct data analysis. Since I knew the topics I wanted to focus on, I chose to

conduct a thematic analysis for the data (Miles & Huberman, 1994). Themes I focused on

included the functions participants used on WeChat, participants’ purposes of using these

functions, distinct uses that I did not observe in China, and participants’ motivations of

continuously using WeChat in the US. Unexpected, emergent themes that were relevant to

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my concerns were also noted for coding. I went through the interview transcripts oneby

one and coded them with short phrases (i.e., codes), looking for participants’ responses that

highlighted these themes. In the end, I grouped the codes into higherlevel categories: uses

of WeChat that are distinctive to the US, reasons for staying onWeChat, reasons for leaving

WeChat, and other uses. For participants’ quotes in the next section, I translated them from

Chinese to English verbatim.

8.3 Findings

Before conducting this study, I expected participants to use WeChat less often than they

were in China since there were many other social networks and instant messengers avail

able in the US. However, the findings shown that most participants still used WeChat quite

frequently, in similar ways that people in China use WeChat. This section presents findings

on when participants would turn away from or keep using WeChat, their reasons behind

these decisions, and why for most participants, it was more important to stay on WeChat

than to permanently leave WeChat.

8.3.1 Situations and Reasons of Turning Away from WeChat

Most participants used WeChat as their major communication tool, but there were also a

few situations when participants had to turn away from WeChat. They made this decision

by drawing from their culture repertoires and weighing the technical and design constraints

of WeChat.

Leave WeChat When Making Payments

Xia Chen was a young woman working in a tech company. She used WeChat frequently

and enjoyed shopping. In the US, credit card and Apply Pay were Xia’s default payment

methods, so she never carried cash with her, which was “just like when I was in China,”

she said. She added a few Chinese WeChat sellers who lived in the US to her WeChat, and

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she had bought several pairs of earrings from them. Yet, she did not pay them via WeChat.

She explained her reasons as below:

I use WeChat to communicate with these sellers from the beginning of our

conversations till the end, but I never use WeChat to pay. This is because

WeChat only supports transactions in Chinese yuan, and here in the US, we all

think “what’s the point of receiving Chinese yuan?” So I would rather use other

applications such as Venmo, which supports payment with dollars. There is no

need to use WeChat to pay: what are you going to do with all the yuans you

receive? You can’t even withdraw them as cash. If WeChat supports US dollar,

I think people will use WeChat [to pay] because WeChat is more convenient.

The exemplar above describes a situation where participants had to leaveWeChat: when

making payments. In China, participants used eitherWeChat or Alipay for payment because

these applications were widely acceptable. However, in the US, participants drew from the

culture tool kit they developed locally and learned that credit cards and payment applications

such as Venmo were more acceptable than WeChat. I provide more examples below.

When being asked what was the number one payment method he used in the US, Yue

Xu answered, “I use American credit cards to pay. I use them because they can accumu

late credits and they have cash back.” Yun Zhou echoed by saying “Most of the stores

[in the US] do not accept Alipay or WeChat. Also, I use credit cards because I get used

to pay with them.” Yun Zhou and seven other participants also used Venmo or Zelle to

split restaurant checks when eating with other people. They had to split check because the

restaurant only accepted one or two credit cards per table. While they could use WeChat

for splitting payments, the currency accepted in the US is US dollar, so it made sense to use

American applications that supported transactions with dollar instead of WeChat. Besides

splitting payment, Jiaxin Liu and five other participants used Venmo or cash to pay and

receive money facetoface as well, in situations where they bought or sold secondhand

goods from other people.

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Since there were places (e.g., Chinese restaurants) where paying with WeChat was wel

comed in the Bay Area and Atlanta, I asked participants if they had used WeChat to pay in

those places. All participants in the Bay Area and most in Atlanta knew there were places

around that acceptedWeChat for payment. But even though these places existed, and partic

ipants could pay with WeChat when they visited there, they seldom did so. Few exceptions

included Xiaojun Lin (who once used WeChat to pay at 99 Ranch, a Chinese supermarket),

Xiaolin Sun and Yue Xu (who paid with WeChat once in a Chinese restaurant), and Gan

Jin and Liumeng Wu (who paid with WeChat on Chinese shopping websites in the US).

These participants used WeChat to pay because they had some money left in their WeChat

accounts, they could get some benefits such as discount, and there was no other way to

spend the money. As Xiaojun Lin explained,

I usedWeChat to pay in 99 Ranch once because I saw it says it accepts WeChat

Pay. I had some money left in WeChat since I just got back from China. I paid

with the money in WeChat because the money was already there, and I had no

other ways to use it. But most of the time, I don’t have money inWeChat. That

was the only case I used WeChat to pay in the US.

Compared with elsewhere in the US, Chinese restaurants, Chinese supermarkets, and

Chinese shopping websites are places where cultural tool kit reflects Chinese norms more

than American norms. Thus, it is not surprising that WeChat and Chinese yuan are accepted

in these places, since Chinese people are familiar with them as part of Chinese cultural tool

kit. However, because these places are still situated in the larger environment of the US,

motivating people to pay with WeChat, which is not part of the cultural tool kit in the US,

requires extra conditions (e.g., there is money in WeChat account) and incentives (e.g.,

discounts when paying with WeChat).

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Leave WeChat When Discussing Sensitive Topics

Liumeng Wu was a Master student living in Atlanta. Unlike many of her peers, she cared a

lot about what was happening in China, and she sought information and news about China

constantly. Although she read articles posted by different WeChat official accounts, she

thought theywere full of biases and did not agreewithmany of their opinions. She knew that

information circulating on WeChat was censored, and she was concerned with censorship

on WeChat. It made her feel she had to be very careful with what she says on WeChat. She

said,

I feel I’m being monitored byWeChat. I can’t say whatever I what to say. I also

feel it is easy to get my WeChat account suspended if I share sensitive infor

mation onWeChat. I guess the contents onWeChat are under the control of the

government. But I won’t stop using WeChat just because of this, plus I don’t

discuss sensitive topics with everybody. I will certainly censor myself before

I say anything, so I won’t say stuff that’s considered sensitive on WeChat. If

I want to discuss sensitive information, for example, with my partner, we will

talk about them facetoface.

The exemplar above shows that surveillance and censorship on WeChat can push par

ticipants away from WeChat, although temporarily. It also means that there were things

that participants wanted to discuss, but they avoided discussing on WeChat. Indeed, in this

study, all the participants knew their conversations on WeChat were surveilled. Xiaolin

Sun told me he knew that the Chinese government could easily monitor users on WeChat,

and Chilun Zhang compared WeChat with Facebook, describing Facebook as “open” while

WeChat as “something with strict censorship.” Strategies utilized by Liumeng Wu above

to avoid being censored on WeChat, such as selfcensorship and leaving WeChat for other

communication channels, were used by other participants as well. For example, Ren Yu

said when talking about sensitive topics, she would chat on iMessage instead of WeChat:

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“Since WeChat is from China, I don’t feel comfortable talking about politics and other

serious topics on WeChat.” Since WeChat as a Chinese application is associated with cen

sorship, when participants faced the risk of being censored, they had to weigh carefully if

they wanted to use WeChat for communication. The message that “WeChat censors” was

part of participants’ knowledge in their Chinese cultural tool kit.

Although participants knew that conversations on WeChat are surveilled and censored

(as a common knowledge), none planned to stop usingWeChat permanently. In fact, except

for the participants mentioned above, few participants brought up censorship as a cause for

limiting their uses of WeChat during our interviews. Most participants did not see surveil

lance and censorship as obstacles or threats, and none of them planned to leave WeChat

permanently because of Chinese government’s surveillance on the platform. Fei Wang was

in the majority participants who cared little about being surveilled and censored. She ex

plained her motivation:

My conversations with my friends are not affected by censorship, and since

WeChat is convenient, I choose WeChat. I don’t really talk about anything

sensitive, and I’m not the kind of person who sends a lot of messages. So, I

don’t think there is a necessity to stop using WeChat and switch to something

else.

From the perspective of the medium is the message, an important message carried by

WeChat as a communication medium is surveillance and censorship: if you use WeChat,

everything you send onWeChat will be monitored and what you read will be censored. Par

ticipants understood this well and distinguished this property of WeChat from other media.

Leave WeChat to Contact People Who Are Not on WeChat

Xiaolin Sun was a graduate student living in Atlanta. He used WeChat frequently to chat

with his partner, parents, and friends, who were mostly in China. However, he had to use

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WhatsApp to contact a good friend, whom he got to know when they were both in China.

His friend stopped using WeChat and switched to WhatsApp because he was concerned

about WeChat’s surveillance and censorship. Hence, when Xiaolin wanted to contact this

friend, he had to useWhatsApp. This was currently not an issue since both he and his friend

were in the US; however, this situation might change if either of them goes back to China

as WhatsApp, similar to many other foreign online services, is blocked in China.

This exemplar shows that participants had to leaveWeChat to contact people who do not

use WeChat. These people included participants’ Chinese friends who had concerns with

WeChat and participants’ American peers and colleagues who did not use WeChat. Besides

Xiaolin Sun, several participants had also been in similar situations: Xiaojun Lin, Jiaxin

Liu, and Ren Yu were all young women who worked in technology companies, and they all

used Slack to contact their colleagues because Slack was the designated communication tool

of their companies. QianyuWang, LiumengWu, Sheng Zhu, and Si Lei, who were graduate

students, used Slack to contact the nonChinese peers in their programs. When being asked

what tool she used for group project communication, Liumeng said, “If everybody in the

group is Chinese, we will create a new chat on WeChat. If there are three Chinese people

and one foreigner, we will create a chat on FacebookMessenger. If everybody is in the same

Slack channel, then we will create a chat on Slack. It depends.” QianyuWang agreed: “You

can’t expect Americans to use WeChat with us.”

Besides working and studying, participants had to leave WeChat if people they cared

about were not onWeChat. Ying Li still used QQ because some of her friends only used QQ

but notWeChat, and Gan Jin used Telegram out of the same reason. Xia Chen’s boyfriend is

a CanadianChinese, so Xia used Facebook Messenger to contact her boyfriend: “Because

my boyfriend is Canadian and his friends are all foreigners, we usually chat on Facebook

Messenger instead of WeChat. There are two or three friends of his who use WeChat, but

he doesn’t use it.”

Participants’ experiences above are straightforward, but they show howWeChat is seen

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as a Chinese application that is expected to be used only by the Chinese, even though

WeChat is available in many languages and regions. This is another message carried by

WeChat as a medium: only the Chinese, but not other people, use WeChat.

Leave WeChat to Learn American Culture

Yue Xu was a first year Master student who had just moved to the US six months ago.

Before, Yue had never been to the US. Moving to a new country, Yue was interested in

learning about American culture and things happening around him. Thus, he registered

Twitter and Reddit, regularly checking the trending posts on both social media. Since he

was very interested in knowing American people’s opinions of China, Yue also followed the

China subreddit on Reddit. “I’ve come to a new place, so I need to understand this place,”

he said.

The exemplar above shows that participants left WeChat and used other online social

media when they wanted to understand and learn about American culture and news. Par

ticipants chose American social websites or news outlets to gain knowledge about the US,

even though there were plenty official accounts onWeChat that provided information about

America. For instance, Ren Yu andQianyuWang read technology news on LinkedIn, which

provided news about technology development in the US. Likewise, when checking updates

about local news, Sheng Zhu visited CNN’s official website rather than reading news in

WeChat official accounts. He said, “I don’t think stuff posted by WeChat official accounts

counts as ‘news,’ so I won’t treat them too seriously. I think news needs to be formal and

serious, meaning that it has to be responsible for what it is saying. If I want to read news,

I will turn to news applications.” Similar to Yue Xu, Qianyu Wang and Xiaolin Sun used

Reddit to know more about America. Xiaolin said, “I saw a lot of American students use

Reddit. They often check out Reddit when waiting for the class to begin. If I search for the

subreddit of my school, there is a lot of information about stuff happening around me, in

my community. Reddit has stuff that’s closer to me.”

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These examples lead to the same conclusion as the previous section. Since WeChat is a

Chinese application, participants thought information that is not related to China should be

sought from elsewhere, even though such information is available on WeChat. If one wants

to know about the US, one turns to American media.

8.3.2 Situations and Reasons of Staying on WeChat

Compared with the situations that pushed participants away from WeChat, there were ar

guably more important situations and reasons that made participants stayed on WeChat.

These reasons are related to WeChat’s technical features, people on WeChat, and WeChat

as a Chinese social application.

Stay on WeChat Because It Has Powerful Functions

Chilun Zhang was a freshman in college. He started using WeChat since middle school, so

he was quite familiar with WeChat and used it very often. He had multiple different groups

on WeChat, in which he discussed schoolwork, interests, and future career opportunities,

although many group members were strangers he had not met in real life. He also owned

an official account in which he posted information and thoughts related to his major. He

said, he could use WeChat to contact important people or resources he needed, and this

was the main motivation for using WeChat. Knowing WeChat well, he also took advantage

of diverse functions on WeChat and thought they were powerful. For instance, if he saw

something on WeChat that he wanted to read later, he would forward the information to

the builtin “file transfer” account on WeChat. This way he could save it for later read and

access it on WeChat’s computer application (he had WeChat logged in on both his phone

and computer.) In addition, he even used WeChat as a search engine:

If I see a term mentioned in a group chat and I don’t know what it means, say

“neoliberalism,” of course I could search on Google or even Oxford Handbook

and read several pages of their explanations and get what neoliberalism means.

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But during the fastpaced conversation happening in a group where there are

five or six new messages showing in a second, it is more direct to search for

the term on WeChat. You type the term in the search bar of WeChat, and you

will get some simple, maybe not that accurate definitions of the term. For

me, intuitively, searching on WeChat is more convenient than opening another

application.

The exemplar above shows that participants valued some functions provided byWeChat.

They stayed on WeChat so that they could keep using these functions as needed. A few

functions that were commonly praised by participants include its search function, its mini

programs, and its builtin file transfer account, which can be used to transfer information

between the user’s WeChat mobile application and computer application. More examples

are provided as follows.

Similar to Chilun Zhang, Liumeng Wu used the file transfer function on WeChat as a

notepad and a reminder. Having her WeChat account opened on both her computer and her

phone, she sent information she saw on computer to the file transfer account in her computer

WeChat, so that she could open the same file transfer account in her phone WeChat and

receive the information she sent via computer. Yun Zhou, Xiaojun Lin, and Ren Yu also

used the file transfer function this way. Xiaojun said she preferred WeChat’s file transfer to

AirDrop, because “For AirDrop, I need to open the Finder on my computer first, then find

my phone, and then drop the file I want to transfer, plus I need to have both my computer

and my phone open at the same time. If my phone is dead with no battery, I can’t use

AirDrop. But with WeChat, I don’t have to worry about this; I can transfer and receive stuff

asynchronously.”

Gan Jin and Ying Li were happy that they could access thirdparty services from nu

merous mini programs on WeChat. For example, Ying played a game with her friends on a

WeChat mini program called Script Kill (Juben Sha,剧本杀). Gan and Ying thought mini

programs on WeChat were convenient, saving them time from downloading other applica

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tions or registering new accounts. Si Lei compared the searching functions on WeChat and

Facebook Messenger and thought WeChat’s was better: “It is pretty easy to search for a

chat record on WeChat. For example, if I want to search for an image in a group chat, I can

open the group chat, tap ‘search,’ and then tap ‘media.’ WeChat categorizes chat records

well.”

These functions on WeChat could meet participants’ needs, leaving participants an im

pression that WeChat was simple, convenient, and valuable to use. These characteristics of

WeChat were also a message carried by WeChat, attracting participants to stay on WeChat

and use it.

Stay on WeChat Because It Represents Home

Si Lei was a first year Master student who had never been to the US before. She used

WeChat very often and had pinned two conversations to the top of her WeChat: one was

her family group chat, the other was a oneonone chat with her boyfriend. Although living

in the US, she did not care much about what was going on in the US, so she rarely read

American news. She said she did not care about politics at all, because “it is not something

I can control.” If she needed to contact her American peers, she would use Slack instead

of Facebook Messenger. This was because she did not want to participant in her American

peers’ social circles and Facebook Messenger made her feel too close to them, while Slack

was more official and distant. She explained: “Americans like to party, which I don’t really

understand. I only want to make several friends.” Undergoing a culture shock, Si felt

WeChat was more familiar to her as a Chinese. She said, “I think WeChat is a relaxed

and safe environment. I usually don’t do formal work when I’m on WeChat, mostly just

randomly chatting or looking through stuff on Moments.

The exemplar above shows themost critical reason ofwhy participants stayed onWeChat

even though they were not in China but the US: participants saw themselves as Chinese,

and thus they felt more comfortable speaking Chinese and hanging out in an environment

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that resembles Chinese culture and features to them — in an online space, this environ

ment is WeChat. For instance, besides Si Lei, Sheng Zhu said even though he could send

messages in Chinese to his Chinese friends on American social platforms, he preferred to

use WeChat because “WeChat provides a Chinese context, which is familiar to us Chinese

people.” Related to this, Qianyu Wang also said, “If I meet a Chinese person and I do not

add their WeChat, it feels like I have not truly or officially met them.”

This finding was true for most participants, although not everyone articulated well why

they felt more comfortable onWeChat. Usually, they would say “it is more familiar to using

WeChat” (e.g., Xiaojun Lin) and they connected with Chinese people on WeChat “out of

habit” (e.g., Jiaxin Liu). However, there were exceptions.

Ling Huang was a young woman who used WeChat the least often among all partici

pants. She said, “WeChat isn’t my default communication tool nor the social application I

use the most.” Having studied and worked in Hong Kong for a decade since undergraduate,

she was different from other participants in that she was more willing to bond with people

from different countries. For example, she usedWhatsApp to contact her Indian friends and

Facebook Messenger to contact her Taiwanese friends. She also used Facebook to search

for local events to participate in, which was not seen on any other participants. She was

happy with having friends from diverse cultural backgrounds and did not mind using many

social applications due to this reason. Ling said the only reason that kept her using WeChat

was because her parents, who were in China, used WeChat.

Ling Huang was an outlier in this study. She saw herself less as a typical Chinese but

more as a global citizen. Her usage and reflection of WeChat showed from a different

perspective how WeChat is seen as a Chinese, but not an international, application. How

ever, Ling still used WeChat because of her parents, which revealed another vital reason

that participants continued to use WeChat: participants stayed on WeChat to keep in touch

with people they cared about, who often were friends and families in China. This finding

echos both findings from the study on longdistance parent and children communication

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in Chapter 4 and findings outlined earlier in this chapter, where participants temporarily

left WeChat to contact their American peers and friends. Because most of the participants’

social connections, including their closest relationships, were exclusively or predominantly

on WeChat, participants were often compelled to WeChat.

Because there were many Chinese friends and families onWeChat, and becauseWeChat

as a Chinese application was familiar to participants as Chinese people, participants (except

Ling Huang) used WeChat as their number one mobile social platform. In this sense, even

though being an online tool, WeChat offers a sense of home to participants, who were far

away from China.

Stay on WeChat Because It Is Aesthetically Familiar

Mentioned in section 8.3.1, Xia Chen was a young woman working in a tech company.

Since Xia’s boyfriend was a CanadianChinese who had difficulty reading in Chinese, they

usually used Facebook Messenger for communication to accommodate his preference. But

sometimes they also chatted on WeChat: “We sometimes use WeChat as well, because

there are stickers — those animated expressions — on WeChat.” She enjoyed exchanging

cute stickers with her boyfriend on WeChat, because she could not find similar stickers on

Facebook Messenger. She explained:

I think stickers on WeChat are closer to what we Chinese people like. WeChat

has a sticker gallery where people publish the stickers they created, for exam

ple, with their cats. Facebook Messenger doesn’t have these cute stickers. Its

stickers are silly. Maybe there are some cute stickers on Messenger, but I think

its stickers are not as diverse as those on WeChat. Most stickers on Messenger

are cartoonish, which don’t resonate with my aesthetics, so I don’t like them.

The exemplar above shows another specific reason that made participants stay on We

Chat: the stickers onWeChat were aesthetically pleasing and familiar to participants. While

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this reason seems minute, it shows that details in an application, such as stickers, do matter

to users. Besides Xia Chen, Hui Tian, Ren Yu, and Min Jiang also enjoyed sending stick

ers; they even created customized stickers themselves, taking advantage of the flexibility

provided by WeChat. As one of the communication media offered on WeChat, stickers

resonate with participants’ aesthetics and carry meanings for them. This characteristic of

WeChat cannot be substituted by other communication and social applications.


To participants, WeChat was different from other communication and social applications

because it carried messages that were especially meaningful to participants. Some of these

messages pushed participants away fromWeChat, while other messages strongly convinced

participants to stay on WeChat. As discussed early in the Background, these messages can

be classified into three aspects when seeing WeChat as a medium.

8.4.1 The Technical Aspect of WeChat

The first message carried by WeChat as a medium rests in the technical aspect of WeChat.

Participants knew that the technical functions on WeChat supported them achieving some

goals, but not other goals — and this is one of the messages conveyed by WeChat. For in

stance, while WeChat allowed people in China to make payments easily, it could not reach

the same level of convenience when participants wanted to use it to pay in the US. This

technical incompetence was due to both WeChat’s development as a mobile technology

and the institutional constraint in the US: as a mobile technology, WeChat could have de

signed and developed better payment functions for users in the US, but it did not; regarding

the institutional constraint, using WeChat to pay in the US could be cumbersome because

the currency accepted in the US was dollar, whichWeChat did not support well. While pay

ing via WeChat was not the best option for participants, WeChat did have other functions

that meet participants’ needs. Its searching function and its builtin file transfer account

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were praised by participants as useful, efficient, and valuable. These characteristics of the

technical aspect of WeChat are the first message WeChat conveys to its users: “As a mobile

social platform, I provide useful functions that will support your needs well, but you may

find it difficult to pay via me in the US.”

8.4.2 The Format Aspect of WeChat

The second message WeChat includes relates to the format of the medium. The format

aspect is different from the technical aspect in that the former refers to the format of the

content provided by the latter. For example, there are many communication functions on

WeChat, such as oneonone private chat, and the format of the chat includes text, emoji,

stickers, audio, video, etc. HowWeChat allows its users to communicate with these formats

is the second message carried by WeChat as a medium. The study in Chapter 4 on Chinese

parents and children’s longdistance communication shows that these formats (which are

media as well) embed meanings both independently and collaboratively, based on how par

ents and children used them. In the Findings in this chapter, participant Xia Chen used

WeChat instead of Facebook Messenger to send cute stickers she liked, because only on

WeChat could she find these cute stickers that spoke to her aesthetics as a Chinese. The

style of the sticker conveyed a message to Xia that she was welcomed to send the sticker if

she used WeChat. Hence, the various styles of stickers on WeChat (as one of the formats

of WeChat’s chatting function) are transmitted as a message of WeChat.

8.4.3 The Cultural Aspect of WeChat

The third message carried by WeChat is in its cultural aspect, and it is also the most im

portant and evident message WeChat carries for users in the US: WeChat is a Chinese mo

bile application, and WeChat represents characteristics of China in an online space. As the

Findings shows, usingWeChat, participants could keep in touch with friends and families in

China, and they could text and speak in Chinese without feeling isolated or strange. WeChat

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gave participants a sense of familiarity coming from China. For those who saw themselves

closer to China, they felt more comfortable and relaxed using WeChat than using other

American social applications. For those who wanted to move away from China and learn

about American culture, they used WeChat less often than when they were in China and

instead explored many other American social platforms such as Reddit, Facebook Messen

ger, and WhatsApp. WeChat embeds the cultural characteristics of China, including both

strengths and weaknesses. This means that censorship, which is pervasive in China, is also

presented on WeChat. Hence, participants knew they had to be careful of what they say on

WeChat.

It is necessary to clarify that regarding howmuch the participants cared about the United

States, participants fell under a spectrum between not caring about the US at all and caring

about the US so much that they no longer care about China. This means while all the

participants cared about both China and the US, some cared about the US more and some

cared about China more. For those who were more interested in the US, they made friends

with Americans and used American social networks; for those who cared about China more,

they stayed onWeChat most of the time and kept in touch with Chinese friends and families.

These three messages WeChat carries are not separated from each other. In fact, they

often mingle together, affecting users’ decisionmaking process of when and how to use

WeChat. For instance, WeChat does not support paying with US dollar well because it is

a Chinese social platform that centers on serving people in China (i.e., the cultural aspect),

but it is also because WeChat does not provide clear functionalities for users to bind their

American bank cards (i.e., the technical aspect). Users understand these messages through

using WeChat, flexibly choosing to stay or leave WeChat as needed. Furthermore, they in

tegrated these messages into their own cultural repertoires (Swidler, 1986), as they perform

and reinforce these messages through using (or not using) WeChat. In the Information Age,

the repertoire of cultural tool kit is not only formed offline in the real world but also online

in all kinds of online social networks — with WeChat being one of them.

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The question being asked at the beginning of this chapter, “wouldWeChat still be a necessity

for users who are not in China?” can be answered by findings in this study. WhetherWeChat

is a necessity for users in the US depends on the user — if they care about China more than

the US, if their social circles center more around Chinese people, and if they see themselves

more as a Chinese, they will use WeChat more and thus WeChat is more likely to be a

necessity in their lives. Whether WeChat is a necessity also depends on how people use

WeChat. Similar to studies in previous chapters, participants used functions on WeChat as

these functions were intended to be used. For example, they used communication functions

to keep in touch with friends and families in China. However, in some cases, participants

did not use the functions as they were designed to be used. Instead, they appropriated

these functions to fulfill their own needs. One example was participants Chilun Zhang and

Liumeng Wu used the builtin file transfer account as a reminder for themselves. While

WeChat is not as wellsupported in the US as it is in China, participants’ appropriation of

WeChat reveals that participants still usedWeChat frequently and relied onWeChat to fulfill

their everyday needs even in the US. In the next chapter, I examine different uses ofWeChat

and discuss how these uses influenceWeChat to move from a platform to an infrastructure.

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CHAPTER 9

USER’S ROLE IN PLATFORM INFRASTRUCTURALIZATION

Released in early 2011, WeChat has gained wide popularity in China and becoming an

essential part of Chinese people’s everyday life in the past nine years. As many participants

described in the previous chapters, WeChat is “a necessity” in their lives which “cannot

live without.” Observing this deepening presence of WeChat, I asked, was WeChat still a

mobile platform or had it become something more powerful, for example, an infrastructure?

9.1 Data Analysis

To answer this question, I conducted a new data analysis with data collected from my past

studies on WeChat, mainly the studies conducted in China (see Table 9.1) (R. Zhou & DiS

alvo, 2020). Starting from learning literature on infrastructure (e.g., (Edwards et al., 2007;

Star & Ruhleder, 1996; Star & Strauss, 1999), and see section 3.3 in Chapter 3), I identified

many characteristics of infrastructure that WeChat resembles. I then reflected on Plantin

and de Seta’s work (Plantin & de Seta, 2019) and agreed that WeChat can be defined as in

frastructure, but I also saw a gap in their analysis: a lack of focus on user’s role in WeChat’s

infrastructuralization. I thus analyzed all the data collected from my past studies on user’s

practice ofWeChat in China (see Table 9.1), with a focus on user’s possible role inWeChat’s

infrastructuralization.

Guided by the understanding of infrastructure as a relation between the user and the

tool (Star & Ruhleder, 1996), I constructed a preliminary codebook with the following cat

egories: the functions participants’ used, the purposes of their uses, if their uses conformed

to the design intention of the functions, and the reasons of them conforming or challenging

the design intention. Then, using Charmaz’s coding method (Charmaz, 2006b), I looked

for recurrent categories. Building on the preliminary codebook, I iteratively coded the data,

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Table 9.1: Four Studies on User’s Practice of WeChat in China.

Studies Year No. of Participant Related Chapter1 Longdistance communication between parents andchildren

2016 24 Chapter 4

2 Communication via emojiand stickers

2016 30 Chapter 5

3 Young people’s socialcommerce practices

2017 15 Chapter 6

4 The twin role ofWeChat insocial commerce

2018 26 Chapter 7

met with my advisor to discuss the data, and then added new relevant categories. When the

coding process completed, I grouped categories into three higherlevel themes: (1) uses that

conform to WeChat’s design intention, (2) uses that challenge WeChat’s design intention,

and (3) other uses. In the end, I placed these categories and themes side by side with defi

nitions of infrastructure (Edwards et al., 2007; Star & Ruhleder, 1996) and platform (e.g.,

(Bogost & Montfort, 2009; Gillespie, 2010)), looking for user interactions that contribute

to WeChat’s infrastructuralization as these definitions pointed out (for more details about

these definitions, please look at sections 3.2 and 3.3 in Chapter 3). We found that, first, by

using WeChat according to its design intention, users adopt it and give it a chance to grow

its user base: this matches the deployment and scaling of a system in infrastructure devel

opment (Edwards et al., 2007); second, by using WeChat in ways that challenges its design

intention, users ground WeChat in their local practices, helping it to embed in their diverse

uses: this resembles the localization process of a system when it scales (Edwards et al.,

2007); third, in other uses, users change or create uponWeChat to make it fulfill their needs

even better: this represents the reprogramming of a platform that makes it an infrastruc

ture (Bogost &Montfort, 2009). Summarizing and abstracting these findings, I identified a

threelevel user interaction process of platform infrastructuralization, the major theoretical

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contribution of this dissertation.

9.2 A ThreeLevel User Interaction Process of Platform Infrastructuralization

Users adopted WeChat as an infrastructure through interacting with it on three levels. The

first level is to practice WeChat, which is the regular use of functionalities on WeChat as

they are intended to be used. The second level is to appropriateWeChat, meaning users ap

ply WeChat’s functions for uses that were not intended by the functions. The third level of

user interaction is to create extensions ofWeChat. To do this, users, who have the right tech

nical skills, extend the functional boundaries of WeChat by developing addons to WeChat

and thus create a customized version of WeChat. From the first to the third level, user’s

interaction with WeChat becomes more engaged, and users gain more flexibility for them

selves from WeChat. As user interaction advances, the role of WeChat in user’s life also

changes, moving from a communication platform into an indispensable infrastructure that

supports user’s needs as they wish.

9.2.1 Level 1: To Practice

The first level of user interaction in a platform’s infrastructuralization is user’s practice of

the platform. I use the term “practice” to highlight this adoption of technology that conforms

to the technology’s design intention. Common reasons of user adoptingWeChat include low

effort for learning (Zeng et al., 2013), low monetary cost (i.e., WeChat is free) (Y. Wang

et al., 2015; Zeng et al., 2013), moderate entertainment value (Y. Wang et al., 2015), and

high social values such as the reach of a large social network (Xizi Wang & Ying Qian,

2015; C.B. Zhang et al., 2017). What rules over these reasons is user’s perceived value

— people will use WeChat if they think WeChat is valuable (H. Huang & Zhang, 2017).

I took these reasons into consideration and paid attention to user’s practice of WeChat’s

diverse functionalities, aiming to explore if user’s practice of these functions affects user’s

perceived value of WeChat and in turn influences WeChat becoming a widely accepted

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platform.

Why did participants use WeChat’s core communication functions? According to Chi

nese parents and their children, who frequently used WeChat for their longdistance com

munication since the children were studying abroad, WeChat was chosen because it offers

diverse communication functions (more information in Chapter 4). A few examples include

text/audio messaging, image/video messaging, and realtime audio/video chatting. Partic

ipants told us they used different functionalities on WeChat for different communication

purposes. For instance, children used video chat for checking in with their parents but sent

images of meals they cooked to assure parents they were eating well. A mother said her

son who studied in the U.S. “likes to share photos of dishes he cooks in our WeChat family

group, and the food looks really nice in the photos.” An undergraduate student studying in

the U.S. also said, “WeChat is good for making video calls and sending images, so we use

WeChat to communicate.” Since WeChat offers a variety of communication functions, it

was simple for parents and children to stay on WeChat and use the communication features

they preferred (R. Zhou, Wen, et al., 2017). Among all 24 parents and children we talked

with, 16 commented WeChat as “good and convenient.”

For the entertaining communication elements emoji and stickers (more information in

Chapter 5), participants said they used them because they were “livelier and funnier” than

text, which participants described as “boring, dry, and limited in expressiveness” (R. Zhou,

Hentschel, et al., 2017). A male participant in his late 50s said, “I use stickers all the time.

I’m a funny person, so I enjoy sending funny stickers like the ones with cartoon animals.”

Participants also appreciated WeChat for providing a “sticker gallery” with a large pool of

different stickers, making it easy to select and use stickers. A woman in her 20s told us,

“When I notice someone sending a new sticker I haven’t seen before, I will open sticker

gallery, checking if there’s any new sticker I like.” Participants liked that emoji and stickers

are offered on WeChat so that they could use them.

Money transfer and Red Packet are two major financial functions on WeChat, and both

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of them were used by participants in my studies. One father said, “I send Red Packets to my

daughter on WeChat during festivals and on her birthday. When she comes back to China

during school breaks, she can use the money.” When being asked what she does onWeChat,

a 54yearold woman told us, “It is mostly about grabbing Red Packets in groups. Nomatter

who sends Red Packets, I grab them for fun.” In the third study (see Chapter 6), seven out

of 15 participants, who were teens or young adults, said they used money transfer and Red

Packet on WeChat because their parents sent them allowance through these functions. As a

14yearold boy said, “my dad sends me money in Red Packets, and I use this money to buy

stuff like food and coffee.” Making purchases with WeChat in offline stores was common

among participants since WeChat Pay was widely acceptable in cities and towns they lived.

Examples above show participants valued WeChat because WeChat has functions they

needed and enjoyed in an accessible, convenient fashion, thus participants used these func

tions as they are intended to be used. I conclude that the first level of user interaction of

WeChat infrastructuralization is to practice functions onWeChat as they are intended, espe

cially its core communication functions. On this level, with more functions become avail

able, more users use WeChat and the reach of WeChat rapidly expands, making WeChat a

widely accepted platform. But only using functions on WeChat by abiding to their design

intentions does not mean WeChat becomes an infrastructure, even though it is seen as a

default communication choice. The first level lays out the foundation for WeChat to poten

tially become an infrastructure. To reach the deep embeddedness of infrastructure, the next

level is decisive.

9.2.2 Level 2: To Appropriate

Much research has been done on technology appropriation (e.g., (Carroll, 2004; Dix, 2007;

Dourish, 2003)): the practice of using functions on a technology, but not in ways these

functions are designed for. Scholars investigated the details of user’s appropriation of tech

nology and found that user appropriates a technology when there is no good tool to fulfill

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their needs (e.g., (Evans et al., 2018)) or when it is easier or more efficient to achieve a

goal if they appropriate the technology (Dix, 2007). Technology appropriation is thus not

planned actions; it is user’s spontaneous reactions that happens during their interactions

with technology. Since user appropriation is difficult to envision when developing a tech

nology, some scholars argue it should be included as part of the technology development

process led by users (Carroll, 2004; Pipek, 2005).

Technology appropriation is fundamental when developing an infrastructure. It is com

monly found in the second phase of infrastructure development: scaling (Edwards et al.,

2007). In this phase, a system expands from its initial context of use to many different con

texts, aiming at reaching as many users as possible. Thus, the goal of this phase is to build

a large user base across numerous locations and at the same time arrive at a deep embed

dedness for each individual user — both are realized by user’s appropriation of technology

partially (there are other social and technical forces as well). In Star and Ruhleder’s words,

a system’s scaling with user’s appropriation represents the negotiation process between the

system and the user to resolve the tension between global and local: “[A]n infrastructure

occurs when local practices are afforded by a largerscale technology, which can then be

used in a natural, readytohand fashion” (Star & Ruhleder, 1996).

I found examples of appropriation of WeChat when participants appropriated the design

intention of customized sticker (more information in Chapter 5). Customized stickers, in

stead of being provided in sticker gallery, are directly converted from photos users took or

created elsewhere and then uploaded toWeChat by users. They can be static images or gifs,

and are designed for expressing nonverbal cues such as emotions and feelings (R. Zhou,

Hentschel, et al., 2017). One female participant told me she knew a WeChat group where

members did not send text messages, but only customized stickers made from pornographic

videos. Living in a small town in central China, she explained that members of this group

were not techsavvy, and many lived in rural regions without highspeed internet or afford

able mobile data plans. Instead of watching pornographic videos on the internet (illegal in

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China), it was easier to be in such a group and see animated stickers showing short porn

video clips (illegal as well). Another participant who lived in a rural region sold mobile

data plans on WeChat. To activate the data plan, her customers had to change their phone

setting. Since many customers who used iPhones did not know how to change the setting,

she sent a customized sticker that illustrated the procedures as a series of continuous phone

screenshots with text instructions — just like a tutorial (R. Zhou, Hentschel, et al., 2017).

For her, sending this sticker was easier and faster than typing long text. Because stickers

are much smaller in file size than video clips, I found them being appropriated more often

by users whose phones have limited storage space or processing power, and I encountered

most of these users when conducting the second study in rural regions of central China.

Appropriation of sticker serves needs that cannot be easily met under certain social and

technical constraints.

When walking us through the stickers she used, a female participant in her early 20s told

me she saw people gamble in WeChat groups by sending Red Packets and a die sticker. The

die sticker is a builtin customized sticker offered byWeChat that cannot be altered by user.

As a pictorial representation of a die, when user sends this sticker, it “rolls” as animation and

then stops, randomly showing a number from one and six. This woman said, “I saw people

sending Red Packets and the die sticker together. It seems like they gamble by sending the

die sticker, and then the one who loses will send Red Packets.” On WeChat, neither the

die sticker nor Red Packet is designed for gamble, but some users still appropriate these

functions.

Central to the last two studies was appropriation ofWeChat’s communication and social

functions. Instead of using other online shopping websites or WeChat Store, an online

shopping mall within WeChat, participants appropriated WeChat’s instant messenger and

Moments for buying and selling, with the help of financial functions such as money transfer

and Red Packet. Because neither the instant messenger norMoments onWeChat is designed

for shopping, this social commerce practice is an appropriation of communication and social

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functions ofWeChat. Similar appropriations of social network have been observed on other

platforms too, such as Facebook (Evans et al., 2018; Moser et al., 2017).

There are several reasons of participants appropriating WeChat’s instant messenger and

Moments for buying and selling. Because WeChat is a social platform with a gigantic

reach in China, it is easy and convenient for sellers to get to know more customers and

talk to them directly. It is also more effective to advertise on Moments than on traditional

shopping websites where there are many more competitors. A 24yearold female seller

told me, “On WeChat, [one can] just advertise on Moments. If people see your stuff when

they look through their Moments, they might get interested and message you.” For buyers,

becauseWeChat holds most of their social relationships, they can see when their friends and

family members start selling products and advertising onMoments. Since buyers know and

trust their friends and families, it is natural for them to buy qualitysensitive products such

as baby formula (Guilford, 2013) from people they trust on WeChat but not from unknown

sellers on shopping websites. A mother of a toddler said, “My cousin is in New Zealand.

There are local stores from which local people buy products. So sometimes I ask him to

bring some stuff for me, such as food or healthcare products. For these products, I won’t

buy from daigous. It’s not safe.” For the 15 young participants in the third study who

bought and sold goods inWeChat’s messenger, the greater possibility of reaching customers

and the commonly used financial functions provide them opportunities to experiment with

commercial practices that used to be out of their reach— important for teenagers who were

transitioning into adults.

Examples above highlight user appropriation of WeChat. On this second level of user

interaction of platform infrastructuralization, users still operate within WeChat’s technical

constraints, but they push the practices envisioned by WeChat through appropriating its

functions for their local contexts and needs. Therefore, the platform designed for global

use is localized by individual users in their own practices, reaching a deep embeddedness in

each of these users’ lives. For those who appropriate WeChat, WeChat is an infrastructure.

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For those who do not appropriate, WeChat remains a powerful platform. This reflects Star

and Ruhleder’s understanding of infrastructure: “Infrastructure appears only as a relational

property, not as a thing stripped of use” (Star & Ruhleder, 1996).

9.2.3 Level 3: To Create

Beyond appropriation, a platform allows for creation— creation of both function and value

(Bogost & Montfort, 2009; G. Parker et al., 2017). On the third level, users with technical

skills (who are often external developers) build functions, add these functions to WeChat,

and create value for themselves, other users, and WeChat. In one case, we found users

even altered WeChat functions through hacking. Creating upon WeChat allows for a user

customized version of WeChat. While this level is not necessary for user to transform a

platform into an infrastructure, what we observed from WeChat users is that the prolifera

tion of specialized function has helped WeChat meet unique needs and encouraged synergy

between other corporate interests to create a fully realized infrastructure with greater value

to the user.

The first approach to create on WeChat is through building addons to WeChat. Both

WeChat official accounts and mini programs (see Figure 9.1) allow users to build addons.

While official account owners mainly use official accounts to distribute content such as

news or advertisements, they can also develop customized functions for their followers to

usewithin their official accounts. For example, young participants who lived in ametropolis

told us they used a reservation function in some restaurants’ official accounts to reserve

spots or start queuing before arriving at the restaurant. Similarly, a female participant who

lived in the same city said, “Before going to a hospital, I will check on its official account

to look for available slots and book them. This way I can save some time and hassle.” By

creating extra interactive functions in their official accounts, official account owners, who

are also WeChat users, create value such as convenience and efficiency for other users.

Compared with official accounts, mini programs offer more freedom for customization

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Figure 9.1: McDonald’s WeChat Mini Program.

of function similar to a standalone application. With WeChat API, users can build their

own mini programs and add them to WeChat (Ma, 2019), making them available for bil

lions of users on WeChat. While we have not had the chance to study user experience of

mini program, other scholars have found that WeChat users use a variety of travelrelated

mini programs to assist in planning travel, booking flights and hotels, understanding new

languages, and more (A. Cheng et al., 2019). When doing fieldwork in China, the first au

thor used McDonald’s mini program to order food and pay with money in WeChat Wallet

before arriving at the fast food shop for picking up (see Figure 9.1), saving much waiting

time.

Both official accounts and mini programs are managed through WeChat Official Ac

counts Platform (Tencent Technology, 2019). External developers, after submitting appli

cations for registering new official accounts or mini programs, need to wait for WeChat’s

review and approval of their applications. Once approved, external developers can use

the API offered by WeChat to develop official accounts and mini programs. Before final

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Figure 9.2: An Advertisement for a Pirated WeChat with a List of Extra Functions that AreNot Provided by the Official WeChat.

releasing, WeChat will again review the externally developed official accounts and mini

programs, ensuring they abide by WeChat’s regulations (WeChat Team, 2019). This whole

process is strictly under WeChat’s control.

The second and also a substantially more difficult approach for creating a customized

WeChat is to hack into WeChat, change its functions, and come up with a new WeChat.

When doing fieldwork for the second study in a village in central China, we met a young

WeChat seller who used a pirated WeChat to help her manage customers. She told us most

of her friends, who were WeChat sellers as well, used some kind of pirated WeChat appli

cations, making it extremely easy for them to add more people to their WeChat (thus grow

customer base) and manage existing contacts. These piratedWeChat applications were only

available through people who developed or sold them, not seen on any formal Android or

iOS application stores. Figure 9.2 shows an advertisement for a pirated WeChat shared by

the seller we chatted with. It lists all special functions it offers that are not provided by

the official WeChat. Examples include “automatically adding all people nearby as con

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tacts” and “deleting inactive contacts with one click.” The participant paid for this pirated

WeChat, and the pirated WeChat seller then sent it as a package to her phone, instructed

her to change settings on her iPhone to install the pirated WeChat. After installation, this

pirated WeChat coexisted with the official WeChat on her phone. Its interface looked just

like the officialWeChat; it could also dowhat the officialWeChat can do—with some func

tions added or modified as advertised. The participant was free to use whichever WeChat

application she preferred.

This last level of user interaction reflects the definition of platform as a digital technol

ogy with an open architecture that designed to facilitate user interaction. When a platform’s

open architecture is extended upon through creation, it presents itself as an infrastructure,

matching one key quality of infrastructure pointed out by Star: an infrastructure is “fixed

in modular increments, not all at once or globally” (Star & Strauss, 1999). User’s creation

upon WeChat is an instance of fixing WeChat in small increments.

9.3 Infrastructure Is a Contextualized Relation

While the threelevel user interaction process was identified through analyzing findings

from studies I conducted in China, the last study, which I conducted with Chinese WeChat

users in the US (see Chapter 8), also offers insights for understanding WeChat as an infras

tructure. In the last study, I switched my focus from examining WeChat’s use in China to

researching WeChat’s use in the United States, hoping to learn if there were any differences

in WeChat’s use when the context changed. What I found, when viewing infrastructure

as a relation between user and the tool (Star & Ruhleder, 1996), was that WeChat as an

infrastructure is not only a relation but also a contextualized relation, where the “context”

in “contextualized” does not solely mean the country WeChat is in. My study on people’s

use of WeChat in the US revealed several factors that could affect this relation: WeChat’s

compatibility with its surrounding environment, user’s social circle, user’s perception of

themselves, and whether they use other social platforms. First, WeChat’s compatibility

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with its surrounding environment means if its functions can be used in its environment. For

instance, most of WeChat’s communication and social functions can be used regardless of

in which country the user is in, but WeChat’s payment functions could be cumbersome and

poorly supported in places outside China, hindering people from using it as an infrastruc

ture. Second, user’s social circle refers to whether the user’s social circle was mainly made

up by Chinese people. If so, the user will useWeChat more, sinceWeChat is widely adopted

by Chinese people. Third, user’s perception of themselves also affects how much they use

WeChat— if they see themselves closer to China and Chinese culture, they stay onWeChat

more often because WeChat provides a similar environment to China. This factor is con

nected with last factor as well: if the user wants to explore the US instead of caring about

China, they will use WeChat less often but spend more time on American social platforms,

meaning that they are less likely to use WeChat as deeply as an infrastructure.

While all these factors influence whether users in the US use WeChat as an infrastruc

ture, findings from my last study further show that although WeChat may not be perfectly

compatible with the American environment it is in, whether it is an infrastructure to the

users is largely determined by users themselves, their social circles, and the ways they use

WeChat, which may not change even users have moved to the US. This was why some users

in the US still appropriated WeChat (e.g., used WeChat’s file transfer account as a notepad

and reminder), because they had been using WeChat intensively enough to achieve an in

depth understanding of the constraints and flexibility of WeChat. It is thus careless to say

that WeChat can become an infrastructure only in China, or it being an infrastructure solely

depends on where WeChat is. While the environment WeChat is in does affect the perfor

mance of WeChat and how people use it, it is the other factors related to users that matter

more in determining if WeChat is an infrastructure. In conclusion, WeChat being an infras

tructure or not is influenced by users, their social circles, their ways of using WeChat, and

the environment WeChat is in: these are all contexts that matter. If a user relies on WeChat

intensively for their everyday communication within their social circle which largely com

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prises Chinese, and if the user uses WeChat so deeply that they appropriate some parts of

WeChat, WeChat is an infrastructure to this user, even if the user is not in China but in the

US.

9.4 WeChat as a PlatformInfrastructure and Implications of Platform Infrastruc

turalization

To recapitulate the user’s role inWeChat’s infrastructuralization, first, users practiceWeChat

as a social platform and use its functions as they are designed for. This everyday practice of

WeChat rapidly growsWeChat’s user base, widening the reach ofWeChat. Second,WeChat

arrives at a deep embeddedness in users’ lives through user appropriation ofWeChat, mean

ing that users still practice WeChat, but not as it is designed for. While not every user

appropriates WeChat, for those who do, WeChat, with a wide scope that connects a large

number of people and a deep embeddedness in each of their lives, is both a platform and

an infrastructure, or a platforminfrastructure. Third, WeChat can become more embedded

in user’s life if they create new functions on WeChat to fulfill their needs. The first level

is foundational, on which WeChat goes wide; the second is determinant, on which WeChat

goes deep; and the third is to broaden the reach and deepen the embeddedness even further

through customization, rendering WeChat as the invisible support for more user practices.

This threelevel process of infrastructuralization focuses only on the user’s role — it

does not capture all forces at play. For instance, if smartphones had not become widely

affordable in China, mobile applications like WeChat would not grow. If it was not due to

the Great Firewall and the technonationalist focus of the Chinese government (Plantin &

de Seta, 2019), domestic Chinese online service providers such as Tencent (i.e., the owner

ofWeChat) would not have been able to attract users so easily. Therefore, when understand

ingWeChat’s infrastructuralization, this threelevel process should be viewed together with

other related literature (Plantin & de Seta, 2019): it expands on previous literature by high

lighting the user’s role in WeChat’s infrastructuralization.

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This leads to the question of whether this process can be applied to understand other

platforms outside of China, if WeChat’s infrastructuralization is affected by forces that

are peculiar to China, such as the Great Firewall and the Chinese government’s techno

nationalist agenda. While scholars find that WeChat collaborates with the Chinese govern

ment through sharing user data (Y. Chen et al., 2018) and censoring keywords (Ruan et al.,

2016), when coming to WeChat’s infrastructuralization, I found the Chinese government

influenced mostly the first level of user interaction. The government permitted WeChat to

build its user base when they permitted WeChat to compete with the stateowned telecom

munications corporation China Mobile for its instant messaging market (Y. Chen et al.,

2018), allowing for users to move to WeChat. While the government has fewer interven

tions with the second and the third level user interaction process, interactions on these two

levels can even be in opposition to the government (e.g., social commerce practices on

WeChat catalyzed the enaction of the ecommerce law in China (Www.npc.gov.cn, 2018)).

In my analysis, to appropriate and create with WeChat are more critical than to practice

WeChat in platform infrastructualization. I thus argue that this threelevel user interaction

process is not constrained to solely understand WeChat’s infrastructuralization in the Chi

nese context but can be applied to understand infrastructuralization of similar platforms in

other contexts as well — when users play an evident role.

For example, Facebook — the largest social platform in the world (Statista, 2020) and

also an infrastructurelike platform (Plantin et al., 2018). According to scholars, Facebook

has become a nearmonopoly, not with governmental influence, but from its strategical man

agement of its functions, corporate partnerships, and users (Helmond et al., 2019). Simi

lar to WeChat, Facebook first expanded by attracting users with its social functions; with

more users, it added diverse functions; then it was appropriated (e.g., (Evans et al., 2018;

Fauville et al., 2015; Moser et al., 2017)), and it supported users to create on it with its

APIs (Helmond et al., 2019). The ways WeChat and Facebook attract and support users by

adding functions and increasing flexibility are very similar, pushing towards the same goal

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of reaching pervasiveness and embeddedness in user’s life. The threelevel user interaction

process can thus also shed light on the user’s role in Facebook’s infrastructuralization.

There are many implications of platform infrastructuralization. As discussed earlier,

the most prominent difference between the ways platforms and systems infrastructuralize

is that platforms do so through conquering almost the entire market, defeating its competi

tors and thus achieving a nearmonopoly (Edwards et al., 2007). For instance, WeChat is

now viewed as the “default” communication tool in China. For platform owners, there are

evident benefits of owning an infrastructure (rather than a platform): with more users, more

data can be generated and collected, thus attracting more capital and power than a locally

used platform (Helmond et al., 2019).

For users, platform infrastructuralization presents both advantages and disadvantages.

The advantage for using a platforminfrastructure is that user can save time and energy from

choosing among multiple services, since there is only one dominant service provider in a

market (e.g., Facebook for social networking in some countries). If these platforms offer

diverse functions (e.g.,WeChat), it is also more efficient for user to stick with one platform

than to switch.

But the disadvantages for users are more concerning. First, platforminfrastructures

need to be designed to be general, targeting “an average user” but not a specific group of

users. This is because only a generally designed platform can be accessible to most peo

ple, potentially becoming pervasive. This compromise of specificity in design, which also

affects the usefulness of the platform, is also a cause of user appropriation of the platform.

Second, by using platforms and thus allowing them to become infrastructures, knowingly

or not, users are handing their data to platform owners — private corporations driven by

profit but not user’s wellbeing. Although if the user has the right technical skills, they can

hack into the platform and change it for their own needs— but only if they have those skills.

As shown in earlier sections, I only found one participant who used a pirated WeChat. This

singular adaptation characterizes the issue: while freestanding customized platform can be

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developed, it is a luxury, only feasible for those who have initiative, resource, and skill.

Most users can only use platforms as they are given, sometimes appropriating their func

tions, which, in fact, contributes to the infrastructuralization of these platforms.

This difficult situation faced by users — that by using platforms they are handing their

data to platform owners and contributing to platform infrastructuralization — leads me to

asking what we can do as interaction designers and researchers. It is naïve to call upon

interaction designers to act in ways that disrupt this trajectory, because corporate goals

usually conflict with concerns for humans in the case of platform infrastructuralization.

However, when there are opportunities, designers should design for specific groups of users

with focused needs and tasks, instead of designing for an “average” user. Designing for

specificity offers better tools for users to use and makes it less likely for platforms to turn

into monopolies. For example, designers could design focused, local tools to fulfill user

appropriation so that users do not have to appropriate. In addition, as long been discussed,

designers should keep inmind the possible social andmoral consequences when they design

technologies (Verbeek, 2011). In this case, the consequence is a monopolizing platform

infrastructure.

Similarly, researchers who work towards development of tools and tasks that extend the

capabilities of WeChat and other platforminfrastructures should exercise more caution in

how they work. The precedents set by researchers, who are viewed as role models, often

lead their students and governments in developing understandings of what is acceptable in

technology and what is not.

This chapter reveals that WeChat is a platforminfrastructure and users plays a signifi

cant role in WeChat’s infrastructuralization process — this is the theoretical contribution of

this dissertation. Many questions can be asked after understanding this user’s role in plat

form infrastructuralization: Do users know how they contribute to the process of platform

infrastructuralization? What future they will face when platforms become infrastructures?

What will users do when they face this future? Or, if users do not prefer this future, what

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can be done now to create alternative futures? The perils and opportunities discussed above

are only a small portion of what may happen and what can be done. Much more remains

unexplored in the ongoing phenomenon of platform infrastructualization.

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CHAPTER 10

CONCLUSION

Since its birth in 2011, WeChat has slowly developed from a mobile instant messenger

into an allencompassing platform and an infrastructure. By April 2020, WeChat has ac

cumulated 1.16 billion monthly active users (Statista, 2020), becoming the fifth popular

social platform in the world and the most popular one in China. When examined closely,

WeChat is a powerful, pervasive mobile application in Chinese people’s everyday lives;

when looked from afar, WeChat is a miniature of the ICT and internet development in

China. In this dissertation, I present five empirical studies on how and why Chinese peo

ple use different functional aspects of WeChat to achieve diverse goals, delving deep into

the complex facets of WeChat as an interactive technology. I also present a metaanalysis

on data collected from these studies, focusing on how user’s interaction with WeChat in

fluences WeChat to move from a platform to an infrastructure. With all these studies, my

dissertation offers the following contributions:

First, this dissertation provides an indepth investigation of how a nonWestern commu

nication and social application is used by people. While people’s usages of communication

and social applications (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Line) share a lot of commonalities, for

instance, people use them to keep in touch with friends and families, there are many differ

ences in how each of these applications are used as well, since they are grounded in distinct

cultural and social contexts. For WeChat, the Red Packet function it offers is an exemplar

that it is both grounded in and reflecting a Chinese context. Such a cultureladen func

tion has little chance to be developed in nonChinese social applications. My studies have

shown that Chinese people welcomed WeChat’s digital Red Packet by using it for various

purposes, expanding its original usage to many other scenarios: people send stickers featur

ing Red Packets to express their appreciation upon receiving Red Packets (see Chapter 5),

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and parents give their children allowance via Red Packets (see Chapter 6). Further, as an

application that was designed in China and used mostly by the Chinese, WeChat presents a

clear cultural and social sense of China to those who are not in China (see Chapter 8). This

dissertation clearly conveys the “Chineseness” of WeChat, adding up a valuable cultural

piece to the world of social applications, which are dominated byWestern applications such

as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

Second, this dissertation offers an overview of one of the most popular social platforms

in the world from a usercentered perspective, which reveals the coshaping, coevolving

relationship between WeChat and its users — that neither WeChat nor the user moves for

ward on their own; through interacting with WeChat, the user is shaped and changed by

WeChat, while WeChat at the same time is also shaped and changed by the user. On one

hand, by presenting numerous functionalities, WeChat not only aims at fulfilling users’

needs but also cultivating users’ habits (thus changes users). For instance, emoji, stickers,

and other communication media on WeChat collaboratively create a virtual environment

in which users can explore and form novel ways of communication through these media.

For example, these media support users to accurately express themselves (see Chapter 5)

and appropriately present their selfimages (see Chapter 4). On the other hand, users’ ap

propriation of WeChat and creation upon WeChat (see Chapter 9) show that users have the

power to influence and change WeChat as well. For instance, by buying and selling goods

inWeChat’s instant messenger and social network, users forceWeChat to expand from a so

cial platform to a socialcommerce platform (see Chapter 6 and 7), which is not intended nor

anticipated byWeChat. Thus, uncovering the mutual shaping relationship betweenWeChat

and its users, this dissertation is a firm rejection of technology determinism.

Last but not least, this dissertation builds upon and extends previous literature on plat

form infrastructure (e.g., (Plantin & de Seta, 2019; Plantin et al., 2018)) by taking WeChat

as an exemplar, detailing the role played by the user in platform infrastructuralization. Users

interact with WeChat on three levels: to practice, to appropriate, and to create (see Chapter

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9). The further the level goes, the deeper the user interacts withWeChat and pushesWeChat

to become an infrastructure. By identifying this threelevel user interaction process of plat

form infrastructuralization, this dissertation adds a crucial piece to the ongoing exploration

of one of the most significant global phenomena happening now: platform infrastructural

ization.

A question that naturally surfaces at the end of this dissertation is this: Where will

WeChat go next? (And what will it become?) After completing my last study in Spring

2020, I witnessed WeChat making several important moves by integrating key functional

ities, among which included “Channels” (a.k.a. Shipin Hao,视频号) and “Tickle” (a.k.a.

nudge, or PaiYiPai, 拍一拍). Channels represents a new functional section on WeChat

where users can post short videos and view the ones posted by other people. Introducing

Channels is not a surprising move since Chinese users have been enjoying shortvideo plat

forms such as Douyin (抖音) and Kuaishou (快手) for a while, and WeChat might want to

compete with these platforms. Compared with Channels, Tickle is not a functional section

but a small feature, where users can double tap someone’s profile picture in a conversation

to generate an effect that the one being tapped will sense a subtle shake of his or her phone

— a simulation of being tickled or nudged in real life. By observing these recent moves

of WeChat, it is clear that WeChat is still on the way of growing bigger by including more

functions. However, introducing a dedicated shortvideo section also shows that WeChat

fears other newer shortvideo platforms will attract users away from itself. Thus, to re

tain users, it is critical to keep users involved, entertained, and refreshed, which explains

why WeChat develops small, enjoyable features like Tickle. While it is uncertain whether

WeChat will be able to grow its user base further since it has struggled to gain nonChinese

users’ preference, I believe WeChat will not stop from being more omnipresent, embed

ded, and transparent in Chinese people’s life: it is fair to imagine WeChat becoming “the

infrastructure of other infrastructures” in the future.

This dissertation leads readers into the intriguing and fascinating world of WeChat by

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presenting a detailed overview of user’s interaction with different functional aspects of

WeChat. In the era of internet and digital technology, WeChat, although being only one

instance among many information and communication technologies, shows how powerful

a mobile platform could be through integrating various functions and constantly attracting

users, eventually becoming an infrastructure. I hope this dissertation has encouraged the

readers to deeply understand the impact a “small” application could bring; I also hope it

has inspired new ideas, new questions, and new directions for readers. I wish you find this

dissertation valuable.

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Appendices

APPENDIX A

CHAPTER 8 DIARY STUDY INSTRUMENT

Hi [participant name], this is your [Xth] day of participating in this research project. Hooray!

Today’s task is really simple — just come here whenever you’ve usedWeChat and com

plete this short diary survey. You don’t have to literally come here every time you send a

message; you could note down what you’ve done, for example, like after you chatting with

your friend for an hour with a bunch of messages. Hope this is easy enough!

One thing to keep in mind is that you don’t need to use WeChat more or less than you

usually do. Just do what you usually do, and this is what we are looking for. Enjoy!

Pin me on WeChat if you have any questions. If you are ready, click on next to start.

Q1. During what time did you use WeChat for this time? Choose all that apply.

Past midnight: 12 AM— 6 AM

Morning: 6 AM— 12 PM

Afternoon: 12 PM— 6 PM

Night: 6 PM— 12 AM

Q2. Which of the following devices do you use WeChat on for this time? Choose all

that apply.

Mobile phone

Tablet (e.g. iPad, surface pro)

Laptop (e.g. Macbook, surface book)

Desktop computer

162

Q3. Which of the following functions of WeChat did you use for this time? Please

choose all that apply.

Messaging (e.g. oneonone private chats, group chats)

Audio or video chatting

Reading official accounts’ posts

Posting on Moments (aka Friend’s Circle, WeChat’s social network)

Reading posts on Moments

Transferring money in chats (e.g. sending red packets)

Paying offline vendors through QR codes

Using mini programs (e.g. external service accessed from within WeChat)

Other(s), please specify:

Q4. Please briefly describe your purpose of using WeChat this time.

Q5. Optional: Upload a screenshot of what you did on WeChat this time. You could

do this on your phone/computer. This will help when we chat later.

Please do not share anything you do not want to share.

[A “Choose File” button] No file chosen

163

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User's Role in Shaping WeChat as an Infrastructure

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